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Gove: government failed on post-Grenfell promise to listen to social housing tenants
Ministers have not fulfilled their promise to ensure the voices of social housing residents are heard following the Grenfell Tower fire, the housing secretary has said.
In an interview with ITV News, Michael Gove responded to the broadcaster’s ongoing investigation into poor conditions with the social housing sector, stating that he is “ashamed” by the issues it has uncovered.
Mr Gove said ITV’s investigation has “highlighted a situation that we promised to fix four years ago and which we haven’t”.
“One of the things that everyone pledged to do [after Grenfell] was to make sure that people in social housing had their voices heard, and we haven’t done that effectively,” he added.
Mr Gove said he did not blame individual people or local authorities for the poor conditions uncovered and said the problem is partly to do with the quality of housing built in the past.
He added: “I think that there were decisions that were made about how people should be housed, which reflected an attitude that was patronising, bordering on callous.”
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People currently working in local government and housing associations “have been under a degree of pressure for all sorts of reasons”, Mr Gove added.
His comments come almost one and a half years after the government published its Social Housing White Paper, which outlined a number of proposals to improve social housing in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire.
When asked when the proposals in the white paper would be brought forward, Mr Gove said his department was planning to publish the details of a Social Housing Bill in March, with the bill then being introduced in May or June.
Daniel Hewitt, the ITV journalist who has spearheaded the investigation into social housing, also asked the housing secretary whether he believed the government was building enough social homes.
Mr Gove agreed that not enough social homes are being built and said the government needs to look at the planning system to ensure private developers deliver affordable homes, while also supporting councils and housing associations to build more homes.
However, he said the government will not set a target for the number of social homes it will build.
Mr Gove said people have the right to be “skeptical” of the government “given the length of time that’s passed since the Grenfell tragedy and where we are now”, but asked people “judge the government fairly on what we do in the next two years”.
