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Who is new housing minister Dominic Raab?

Dominic Raab is the fourth housing minister in three years. Sophie Barnes takes a look at his background. Picture: Rex Features

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Introducing the new housing minister, Dominic Raab #ukhousing

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A bit about the fourth housing minister in three years #ukhousing

The new housing minister, Dominic Raab, has been tipped as a future leader of the Conservative Party, so for some it was a surprise to see him moved sideways into a junior minister position, rather than up into the cabinet.

Mr Raab comes from the right of the Conservative Party, is pro-Brexit and a strong advocate of free-market economics.
He previously served a seven-month stint as a minister and was a junior minister in the Ministry of Justice for a year.
During his time as a junior minister in the ministry he proposed amendments to the Immigration Bill which would have seen prisoners with sentences of longer than a year deported. He also led debates against a European Court of Justice decision giving at least some prisoners the right to vote.


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On housing Mr Raab has not been particularly active so far in parliament, with Hansard recording few contributions to debates on the topic. But he has been very vocal against building on the green belt.

So vocal in fact, that in February last year he boasted that he was one of the MPs to lobby the government against green belt building as it developed the Housing White Paper.

He said: “I fought very hard in 2011 and 2012 to retain existing green belt protections, and see off attempts to dilute them. I have been similarly active and engaged in relation to the new proposals which have now been set out in the government’s Housing White Paper, published on 7 February.

“In my view, as we strive to build more affordable housing, every effort must be made to avoid building on green belt, and I hope this is a shared objective across national and local government.”

This lobbying reportedly caused Theresa May to limit Sajid Javid’s proposals, making it somewhat surprising that the two will now be working together.

He has also written extensively against green belt development on his blog, and in 2009 described ‘open-door’ immigration as the “first” cause of the housing crisis.

In the Conservative leadership race he backed Boris Johnson, before switching to Michael Gove. In an interview with Total Politics magazine he said: “I can see huge strengths in Theresa May, I’m not going to sit here and flannel you and pretend she was my number one choice, but equally I want to make Theresa May’s premiership work.”

 

He has made waves by regularly speaking out about so-called positive discrimination and was censured by Ms May back in 2011 after he described feminists as “obnoxious bigots” and claimed men were getting “a raw deal” out of the Equalities Act.

He also drew criticism during last year’s election campaign for saying people reliant on food banks were not “on the breadline” but instead have a “cashflow problem”.

Watch Dominic Raab making his comments about food banks here

He penned a report for thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies calling for a reduction to the “burden of employment regulation”, which sought to reduce the influence of trade unions and workers’ rights. The proposals involved no-fault dismissal for “underperforming” staff and abolishing working time regulations.

In 2012 he co-authored a book titled Britannia Unchained, which said British workers were among the laziest in the world. The book claims “[Britain] has a smaller proportion of the workforce pedalling harder to sustain the rest – which is economically debilitating and socially divisive”.

He is a long-time opponent of the European Court of Human Rights, which he believes interferes with British democracy.

He started out studying law at the University of Oxford and followed this up with a master’s at the University of Cambridge.

He started his career as a business lawyer at Linklaters and took secondments at human rights charity Liberty and in Brussels advising on European Union and World Trade Organization law.

He led a team at the British Embassy in the Hague and between 2006 and 2010 worked for David Davis and Dominic Grieve.

He is married with two children and has served as MP for Esher and Walton, in Surrey, since 2010.

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