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There’s been no public announcement yet who will take on the planning portfolio, but we’ve been assured by senior people in the department that Rachel Maclean will be the new Minister for Housing and Planning, as a Minister of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

Maclean is on the rise, having only become an MP in 2017 and joined the government three years ago. She is much-reshuffled (this is her fourth different government department) and not an area in which she has experience. History suggests housing ministers tend not to last, but also that they tend to get promoted: accordingly she will be aiming to impress her colleagues and superiors.

Maclean was born in Chennai, then known as Madras, in India in the mid-1960s, but her family soon returned to the midlands where she attended a state comprehensive school. She went up to St Hugh’s College, Oxford in 1984 to study experimental psychology, and then to Aston University for a master’s degree in work and occupational psychology.

After leaving education her first job was on a graduate management scheme with HSBC from 1989, which saw her posted to Australia, Japan and Hong Kong. She married David Maclean in Solihull in 1992, and they now have three sons and a daughter. Together with her husband, in 2005 she co-founded  set up Packt Publishing Ltd to publish training ebooks for IT professionals.

Maclean took the lead herself in 2011 and founded Impackt Publishing Services Ltd to specialise in HR software for small business. She was a director (Governor) of King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys from 2011 to 2014, and also served for 15 years as a scout leader in Dorridge where the family lived.

In 2013, not having stood for office before, Maclean was selected as Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Birmingham Northfield. This was a Labour-held seat that the Conservatives identified as their best opportunity in the city. She set up a charity, ‘Skilled and Ready’, to help young people develop marketable employment skills, and campaigned hard over the two years before the election.

In the end Maclean achieved a slight swing to the Conservatives, but it only reduced the Labour majority. She supported a ‘Remain’ vote in 2016. Her opportunity came in 2017 when Karen Lumley’s health problems led her to stand down in the marginal seat of Redditch on the eve of Theresa May’s snap election; Maclean won the selection and held the seat with the same majority.

Ministerial office

In Parliament Maclean was a select committee member for a year before being picked as a Parliamentary Private Secretary for Amber Rudd and then Sajid Javid. Re-elected with a landslide majority in 2019, Maclean became junior transport minister in the February 2020 reshuffle after Javid was sacked. After bringing in new rules to allow electric scooters she was promoted in September 2021 to be Minister for safeguarding at the Home Office, and drew up a plan to tackle domestic abuse.

She suffered some embarrassment in May 2022 when during an interview with Sky News she said people could protect themselves from the cost of living crisis by taking on more hours or moving to a better job; the clip was widely replayed on social media as a gaffe. During the crisis that brought down Boris Johnson, Maclean resigned her post and called on Johnson to resign “for the good of the country and our party”.

After first backing Sajid Javid, and then Kemi Badenoch, Maclean endorsed Liz Truss in the leadership election and was rewarded with the post of Minister for Victims at the Ministry of Justice in Truss’s government. Rishi Sunak at first demoted her to Vice Chairman of the Conservative Party, before bringing her back as Housing and Planning Minister in February 2023.

Views on planning and development

Maclean does not seem to have been involved in any planning issues in Dorridge. When standing for Northfield, Maclean’s election address included an endorsement from a Kings Norton resident who said: “I contacted Rachel about unwanted developments in our area as I was very concerned. She got in touch straight away and arranged to come to my house … It’s great to see her standing alongside residents like me on the issues that matter to us.”

Her Northfield leaflets also included a pledge to fight for more affordable housing, but which then set out the need for the right infrastructure to be in place to deal with the increase in residents.

As Redditch MP in July 2019, Maclean protested that Persimmon Homes “has unfinished business here in Redditch” over section 106 payments for previous developments up to 20 years previously, and implied she would oppose outline plans for further housebuilding until they were resolved. After a meeting, Persimmon agreed to pay the £0.5m.

Harry Rich, who was recently reappointed as Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists at the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists (ORCL) – the body that oversees the lobbying industry – gave evidence to parliament about codes of conduct in the public affairs industry.

Noises from some self-interested and self-policed organisations in the industry suggest that so-called “self-written” codes are not independent nor independently enforceable. The Registrar rebuked this claim:

Rich declared: “Self-written codes of conduct are an interesting area. I am required under the Act to allow a registrant to declare any relevant code. I have described in guidance what a relevant code is. Most importantly, and this is where the myth comes in, in order for a registrant to declare their own code they have to have within that code independent external oversight of that code. They cannot mark their own homework. To be fair, when I enforced that, the number of self-written codes diminished rapidly—we are down to just seven at the moment.”

Thorncliffe has an externally-enforced code of conduct, which has been approved by ORCL. ORCL have very strict requirements that codes must be externally-enforced to gain their approval.

Managing Director, Richard Patient, said “Together with our Investors in People Gold award, we are proud of the work we do, the best practice we have and the very high standards that we achieve.”

To receive this approval, Thorncliffe adheres to an externally-enforced Code of Conduct, which protects and strengthens public confidence in what we do. 

Key points within our code are:

• Conduct within the code is overseen by an Independent Adjudicator, who is a member of the Bar Council or Law Society.
• Thorncliffe’s Code of Conduct is part of all colleague’s employment contracts and has been operating since 2005, albeit continually being revised.
• We have our own register to monitor our communications with national politicians and the UK Government
• Our triple-lock means colleagues have to adhere to the law, their council code (if they are also councillors) and the company code.

Harry Rich was speaking (on 15/11/22) to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, giving oral evidence on post-legislative scrutiny of the lobbying act. His remarks about codes are at Q142.

ORCL is the organisation that oversees the lobbying industry, is an independent statutory office holder and receives funding via a sponsor government department.

To download our code, go to https://www.thorncliffe.com/orcllink/

When Liz Truss talks about the anti-growth coalition, she may be talking about Extinction Rebellion, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Labour party, the CBI and anyone living in Islington, rather than anyone preventing the housing industry to put shovels in the ground.

But getting the industry to build is clearly one of her main ambitions, and a critical supply-side reform necessary if she is to have any chance of her 2.5% growth target by 2024 when the general election comes around again.

According to number 10 sources, a major planning announcement is due in October, where she will talk about the critical role of the housing industry in promoting growth.  Investment zones, major infrastructure project and relaxing environmental assessment rules have all been flagged up, as well as abolishing “the topdown Whitehall-inspired Stalinist housing targets”.

Planning applications in investment zones will still be necessary, but radically streamlined.

She’s also talked about her time on a planning committee in Greenwich – time which she has never got back, she says.  But undermining councillor planning committees – which Johnson thought about – is likely to be a step too far. 

Instead, here’s some thoughts which advisers close to her are thought to be considering:

• Making PINS publish a monthly or even weekly report on how many schemes they have processed, and giving them an extra £50 million to recruit more planners.
• Enforcing local councils to combine their planning departments into regional hubs, and funding those hubs properly.
• Relaxing some of the reports required in most cases prior to a planning committee – such as the environmental, ecological and highways reports. 
• Making the 13 or 16 week statutory time limits for planning applications a hard deadline, at which time the application is approved.

Truss talked about her battle to get jobs, get pay rises, and get on the housing ladder; but her battle to free up the development industry might be harder fought. 

The planning announcement is just one of eight major announcements – some of the others being childcare, Big Bang 2, energy (fracking), and deregulation.  It remains to be seen on which ones she can deliver.

Richard Patient, MD Thorncliffe

Email me with thoughts on richard.patient@thorncliffe.com

Construction news:

Here’s a video briefing we produced for councillors in a London borough – the scheme was approved on Wednesday night.

One of the most valuable contributions on Question Time, from someone who is young so will know.

There is no solution to the housing crisis other than building more houses. Everything else is window dressing. #BBCQT pic.twitter.com/dSZT2vlyMf

— Tom Harwood (@tomhfh) June 9, 2022