The States was “caught with its pants down” over housing crisis

Friday 13 December 2024

A failure to adequately tackle the housing crisis has driven moves to try to create a dedicated housing committee.

Deputy Sasha Kazantseva-Miller is leading a requete which would strip out housing elements from the mandates of Environment & Infrastructure, Employment & Social Security, Policy & Resources and the Development & Planning Authority.

"What happened when we started talking about the housing crisis situation, which was from the beginning of this political term, what did we do?" she said in opening the States debate.

"Did we have a commander room we could go to? Did we have the skills and expertise to tap into in one place? Did we have the authority to go and make decisions. No, we didn't, because of the political vacuum created on housing through the dissolution of the previous housing department.

"We were caught with our pants down, and we've been like a frog in boiling water for years not dealing with the housing situation we've had."

The right structures were not in place to respond to the crisis, she said, and it was a frustration shared with many other deputies and the public.

"Once the housing department ceased to exist and its responsibility shared among multiple committees, it diluted any notion of political responsibility in place of a single committee that could focus solely on housing and that could be held to account by the public, by deputies alike."

Different committees were pulling in different directions, she argued, which was shown in the opposing views expressed on the Island Development Plan review and its subsequent delay by at least a year.

"That means some of the land that we desperately need to be allocated, especially for affordable housing, will not now happen."

The opposing views

E&I President Lindsay De Sausmarez, Employment & Social Security President Peter Roffey and Development & Planning Authority vice-President Andrew Taylor all stood to oppose the requete.

Deputy de Sausmarez said: "The proposals are significantly more expensive than the current structure, and I do need to warn members that the costs set out in the requete are, we believe, very much an under representation of those costs.

"It will not only increase the size of government, again, something we believe that has been underrepresented, but it will also add complexity bureaucracy, and ultimately reduce the effectiveness of decision making and delivery on the State's objectives on housing."

She explained some of the factors behind housing pressures, including the acceleration in population since the pandemic and wider economic factors like Brexit and the war in Ukraine.

"Deputy Kazantseva-Miller is quite right to point out our market has not been delivering the houses that the Guernsey community needs for many, many years and decades, in fact, but actually just where we needed more, faster, the industry was very much hampered by those macro economic factors which had the effect of making materials much more expensive and at times, much more difficult to get hold of, labour much more difficult to get hold of and again, significantly more expensive than it had been."

Deputy Roffey felt there was a false nostalgia of the past housing committees. He said that at no time was there a housing committee of the type being proposed.

When they did exist, three quarters of their work was around population control and housing licences. The rest was taken up by States housing, because at the time it never got involved in the private market.

The States had been too slow to address challenges in the private market which needed assistance, he said. But it had now agreed the resources for E&I and he did not want that momentum ended.

"And the other false premise, I think, is that we're suddenly going to reduce from having a load of committees involved in housing issues to having only one," he said.

"I think we'll still have a load of committees involved in housing issues. I do not see how Policy & Resources and treasury can possibly be taken out of the equation. If you want to do stuff, you need luca, and they control it."

Debate will resume at the next States meeting on Wednesday 22 January.