Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner hasn’t got a ‘cat’s chance in in hell’ of hitting the Labour government’s housing targets but if she gets even close she should be applauded, the boss of Keystone Property Finance told delegates at yesterday’s Brightstar Specialist Lending Expo.

David Whittaker, Chief Executive of the buy-to-let specialist lender, was speaking on a panel focusing on the mortgage market and its opportunities alongside Adrian Moloney, Group Intermediary Director at OSB Group; Barry Searle, Managing Director at Castle Trust Bank and Steve Cox, Chief Commercial Officer at Fleet Mortgages.

Chaired by Rob Jupp, Group Chief Executive at the Brightstar Group, Whitaker was challenged to outline Labour’s first four months in power.

He told a room packed with nearly 200 guests: “I think when any government has a super majority as this government does it can suffer from a lack of accountability – and you can see how that played out with the last government who had a super majority too.”

PASSIONATE

But he added: “We have a deputy Prime Minister [Angela Rayner] who is the Secretary of State for Housing and she is passionate about what she want to achieve and has made it her ambition to sort out the planning system.

“It’s a big task but without a planning system that works we’ll never going to get to the 1.5 million housing units that the Labour government has committed us to over the course of the next five years.”

STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS

And he went on to say: “It’s about the direction of travel on those numbers. Despite the structural problems in planning in the last year housing developers – big medium or small – only got through 230,000 housing applications whereas it’s normally 330,000.”

“But she’s adequately passionate about it. She doesn’t like civil servants, and she’ll go about it like a bull in a China shop and she might win. We should welcome her passion and commitment.”

However asked what her chances are of getting to that 1.5 million units in five years, Whittaker replied: “There’s not a cat’s chance in hell.

“When she gets to year five and if she’s hitting 300,000 in year five I think whatever your point of view you bow towards her and say ‘well done.

“You’ve achieved something that no government over the last quarter of a century has achieved’.”

MUCH BETTER PLACE

Moloney added: “Labour came into the market in a much better place than the back of the Truss budget. The economy was starting to sort itself out, inflation was down, mortgage rates came down and so from a housing market point of view the trajectory is up and if they can continue that then they are not in a bad place.

“The other bit they have to change which hasn’t happened in previous governments is some consistency in the housing minister. They have an opportunity and if they build on it the economy seems to be going in the right direction.”