Lady in waiting

03/07/2009

The sight of Sarah Teather in her constituency office in Willesden, north west London, challenges any notion that all MPs lead privileged and glamorous lives. The MP in charge of Liberal Democrat housing policy is sitting, almost buried amid papers and clutter, in a dingy store room-cum-office.

In the brighter front office, a newspaper cutting captures her as the fresh-faced, 29-year-old winner of the 2003 Brent East by-election. The surprise victory made her the youngest member of parliament, her ear-to-ear grin that of a jubilant yet stunned National Lottery winner.

Six years on, she has just turned 35, an age she describes as ‘traumatic’ because she remembers her mother being that age. (She herself has no children). Ms Teather has grown into a seasoned member of the Liberal Democrat shadow cabinet. And having held her party’s housing brief for eight months following the resignation of Lembit Opik, she has a decent head start on her newly appointed Labour opponent, John Healey. An earlier stint shadowing then deputy prime minister John Prescott as Lib Dem communities and local government secretary in 2005 has also given her a decent grounding in housing.

That was then. Now Labour’s re-election prospects are looking bleak, its housing kudos not helped by the constant churn of housing ministers. The credibility of both main parties has also taken a battering in the current expenses scandal. Isn’t this the time then for Sarah Teather, one of the few MPs who doesn’t claim the second homes allowance which has seen so many fall, to rise up and seize political dominion of the housing world?

Perhaps it’s because the Lib Dems remain very much the ‘third party’ that Ms Teather shrugs off such sweeping, big-picture questions. Her only political ambition, she insists, is to ‘be re-elected and to remain exactly where I am in my current job and not to be reshuffled’. Despite a comfortable majority, recently redrawn electoral boundaries mean she has a fight on her hands. Her main challenger for the new Brent Central seat is now Labour MP for Brent South Dawn Butler, who won 60 per cent of the vote in 2005. Still, Ms Teather has shown fighting spirit before.

Constituents first

She was among the first to call for former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy’s resignation. But she insists on presenting herself as the champion of the ‘small p’ in politics. Elevate her political status, and she will divert you to a discussion on the grassroots underneath the layers of power. Get her on to the theme of housing and it is her constituents’ experiences she insists on talking about.

‘I’ve always been interested in small p politics and the world around me,’ she says. ‘My mum had always been involved in the local community. The Liberal is all about what you do from the ground up and being active where you live.’

Ms Teather was born in Enfield, north London, and grew up in Leicestershire. She joined the Lib Dems as a 19-year-old studying natural sciences at Cambridge University, because someone thought she was a natural Liberal and invited her in. But she didn’t get stuck into university politics, finding it ‘quite pointless’.

‘I was never involved in the student union because a lot of it seemed to be about politicking for the sake of politicking,’ she recalls. ‘It didn’t turn me on at all.’

Her political activism started when she bought her first flat, in east London, in her mid 20s. She became interested in her neighbourhood and got involved in a local church and a London-based campaign for a living wage. She became a councillor in Islington in 2002 while working as a policy analyst for cancer care and support organisation Macmillan. Then she was encouraged to stand in the landmark Brent East by-election, triggered by the death of Labour MP Paul Daisley, who had held a substantial majority.

These days, Ms Teather says she works a 70 to 80 hour week, her greatest regret being that there are ‘not enough hours in the day’. It doesn’t leave much time for the only non-political pursuits she cares to mention: singing in the parliament choir and seeing friends. When asked about personal ambition, she says it is simply to ‘get home in time to make my own dinner’.

She’s reluctant to engage in any further discussion of her personal life. The same goes for MPs’ expenses, despite having ‘welcomed’ their recent publication.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg brought her in to shadow former housing minister Margaret Beckett in October. ‘They knew I’d really enjoy the housing brief,’ she recalls. ‘I wanted to do it because it gave me an opportunity to talk about things that really matter to my constituents.

‘Twenty thousand families in Brent are on the housing waiting list. There’s enormous housing need and part of the issue is that house prices here rose very quickly and that has an impact on everybody along the housing chain. There are lots of people on low incomes and a lot of overcrowding. We need more affordable housing in Brent and we need those houses to be of a larger size.

‘Every time I go to a new build scheme, I say: “Marvellous, thank you for this, but next time, can we have some four-bed houses, please?”’
Popular choice
Ms Teather has proved a popular choice with housing professionals. One describes her as ‘a bright young thing’. Others say she’s strong, sharp, experienced - and a more credible pair of hands than her predecessor, Lembit Opik.

The big-picture housing policy that seems to rile her most is the government’s review of the council housing subsidy system which has been widely blamed for disincentivising councils to build more homes since it prevents them from reinvesting their rental income in housing. It’s the sluggish pace of the review that irritates Ms Teather: ‘They were talking about this when I was doing this brief in 2005. Why is it that now, in 2009, they’re still talking about reviewing it?

‘We have this ridiculous situation where the prime minister says “we’ll build more council houses’, and then we get this money for two or three houses per [local authority] area. They tinker at the edges, saying “new house building will be outside the [housing revenue account]”. It’s as if they don’t grasp the full scale of the problem.’

She is almost as incensed by what she sees as a lack of substance in Conservative housing policy. ‘The Tories have nothing to say,’ she says indignantly. ‘This week, we had a motion from them. An 11-line whinge [about government housing policy] and not a single idea on how to reform the system.’

It’s precisely this charge that Tory shadow housing minister Grant Shapps has made often against the Lib Dems. There’s talk of a ‘fourth option’ for councils from the Lib Dems and an end to national house building targets, but little detail (Inside Housing, 12 June). Ms Teather promises that housing will be a ‘big deal’ in a forthcoming Lib Dem manifesto and there are three things she’d do if she were made housing minister.

The first would be HRA reform: scrapping what she calls the ‘tenant tax’, by ensuring housing subsidy is met by general taxation, rather than by tenants’ rents subsidising housing in another area.

The second would be tackling the blight of empty properties, partly by bringing down VAT on refurbishments as called for by Inside Housing’s recent Empty Promise campaign. The third thing would be a reform of mortgage law, giving courts more power to intervene in repossessions.

She adds she would resist any form of conditionality creeping into social housing allocations. ‘How on earth can you persuade people to go back into work, if you tell them that as soon as they get work, they’re in danger of losing their flat?’ she asks, harking back to the idea floated by another former housing minister, Caroline Flint. ‘We do need to give people incentives to move out, but that’s completely different from losing security of tenure.’

As we head out into the streets of Willesden to photograph its MP, I push her on the still-unanswered question of why the Lib Dems don’t seem to be capitalising more from Labour’s weakened state. The question is batted off once more, as Ms Teather exchanges greetings and handshakes with constituents and raves about the African fabric and sushi offerings in Willesden’s multicultural main street. There is little time for such indulgences, though. Her constituency office is calling her back - if only there were more hours in the day.