Duncan Bowie spoke at our 2022 conference on – social housing as an essential element of social and economic policy for the public good.

In the 1990s Duncan was in charge of the Housing Corporation investment programme for London – when it was a rented programme – although long since disappeared. After that, he worked for the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, on the planning policies for housing in the London Plan and guidance.

Since moving into academia and then retiring, or semi-retiring, he has run a policy research network – the Highbury Group on housing delivery. It is mainly a professional group. The website contains documents produced over the last 14 years.

The question and answer session held with Duncan after his conference speech included:

1. Failures of the current model – including homeownership, affordable rent homes and transfer of council homes to housing associations.
2. The underspend of money for delivering homes – mentioned in Duncan’s speech.
3. Learning from past models that worked.
4. The extent to which households are unable to buy a home.
5. Holding a local authority landlord to account on promises made and failures to provide information.
6. Did LTF invite any ministers to the conference and would they send them a report from the event?
7. How do we marry up addressing housing needs with planning policy that requires housing targets to be ‘deliverable’?
8. Holding social landlords to account for failures by landlords on the delivery of housing or social infrastructure and promises made in consultations.
9. Request for more information on the acquisition of land at use value rather than full market value
10. Are there matrixes to assess who is readying Duncan’s books and research platform?

Podcast of Duncan’s speech: