Whatever the plan prime minister, please, please… just stick to it

Britain has had enough ‘growth plans’ to fill the British Library; what we’re missing is a government that sticks around long enough to deliver one.

Consider the housing brief. Since David Cameron became prime minister in 2010, there have been 17 different housing ministers (see below).

The longest-serving of these lasted just over two years; 10 lasted nine months or fewer.

Each arrived with a fresh plan and left before it had a chance to work, proving – if proof were needed – that you can’t fix a housing crisis in the time it takes to redecorate an office.

This matters more now than usual. Andy Burnham is expected to become the next prime minister unopposed – a scenario political observers have described as a coronation rather than a contest after a succession of rivals stepped aside and backed him instead.

Unless a dark horse waits in the wings, he’ll be the UK’s seventh prime minister in a decade, inheriting an in-tray that has barely changed in 15 years: not enough homes, ageing infrastructure, and a Treasury that flinches at every big number.

That flinching is the other half of the problem.

Fiscal rules exist for good reason – nobody in construction wants a repeat of the market chaos that followed the 2022 Truss budget.

But when forecasts have worsened, chancellors have tended to scale back or delay spending on infrastructure, housing and local growth programmes to protect a narrow margin of headroom against their fiscal rules, even though it undermines the growth on which that fiscal credibility ultimately depends.

It calms the bond markets for a month, but costs the country a decade.

Caution has a price, and the industry pays it in arrears. Take local roads: the repair backlog across England and Wales has risen from £16.8bn in 2025 to £18.62bn in 2026, a jump of nearly 11%, despite an increase in funding.

The AA logged 137,000 pothole-related call-outs in January and February this year alone, 25,000 more than the same period the year before.

Maintenance keeps losing out to whatever crisis shouts loudest that week, and the bill grows quietly until nobody can ignore it.

The bigger numbers make the same point. The government has committed at least £725bn of public funding to infrastructure over the next decade, backed by a 10-year Infrastructure Strategy and a national pipeline covering 780 major projects.

That’s real progress, but separate analysis puts the true capital requirement at between £1.7trn and £1.96trn by 2040, once rising defence spending is factored in, with the government only able to cover around £1.1trn of that through public investment.

Private capital must fill the rest, and private capital only turns up where it trusts the plan will still be in place next spring.

So, the lever a new government must pull is not another white or green paper – the sector just needs certainty. That means a housing minister who’s still in post in three years, not gone in three months.

It also means a funding settlement for roads and homes that survives a bad quarter of growth figures, and infrastructure spending treated as investment rather than a line the Treasury trims whenever the numbers get tight.

Covid, the war in Ukraine, energy shocks, conflict in the Middle East – instability is the backdrop now, permanently. The government can’t remove that, but it can decide whether the country has a stable foundation to build on despite it.

I see the pattern from where I sit.

Give housebuilders and contractors a credible, funded pipeline and they invest in people, plant and materials ahead of demand.

Take the certainty away, and they wait. The effects of that show up everywhere: fewer homes built, roads left cratered, materials innovation stuck at the pilot stage.

Even something as basic as the embodied carbon locked into a foundation before a house is finished needs long-term policy stability to address properly. You can’t decarbonise a supply chain on an 18-month cycle.

None of this depends on which party holds office. Rather, it depends on whether whoever holds it can commit to a plan and hold their nerve when it gets difficult – because it will get difficult.

The industry doesn’t need government to remove all risk. It needs government to stop being the biggest source of it.

Britain can build. As a country, we have proven that time and time again. What the country needs to relearn is how to finish what it starts.

Ian Dean is managing director of Holcim UK.

* The complete list of housing ministers since 2010:

Grant Shapps (May 2010 – September 2012)

Mark Prisk (September 2012 – October 2013)

Kris Hopkins (October 2013 – July 2014)

Brandon Lewis (July 2014 – July 2016)

Gavin Barwell (July 2016 – June 2017)

Alok Sharma (June 2017 – January 2018)

Dominic Raab (January 2018 – July 2018)

Kit Malthouse (July 2018 – July 2019)

Esther McVey (July 2019 – February 2020)

Chris Pincher (February 2020 – February 2022)

Stuart Andrew (February 2022 – July 2022)

Marcus Jones (July 2022 – September 2022)

Lee Rowley (September 2022 – October 2022)

Lucy Frazer (October 2022 – February 2023)

Rachel Maclean (February 2023 – November 2023)

Lee Rowley (Second term) (November 2023 – July 2024)

Matthew Pennycook (July 2024 – Present)