So it’s goodbye to yet another Housing Minister!

Spare the tears for Margaret Beckett. True she inherited a housing industry on its knees but she has done the sum total of nothing to change this situation. Her attitude has been appalling and one could be forgiven for believing that she had no real interest in the job in the first place, perhaps preferring lifestyle in her beloved caravan.

As we welcome John Healey to the crease as the new Housing Minister, we must hope that we have at least found a Minister who will work with us to deal with the very serious issues that face us and that are at the very heart of the creation of sustainable communities where people have jobs and decent homes to live in.

Welcome aboard, John. Let’s hope we can together “Get Britain Building”.

You can't spin us out of this one!

Having achieved cross party support from Westminster, the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament, you may believe that the instigators of the “Get Britain Building” campaign are feeling pretty pleased with the progress so far.

Not so, we are instead enormously frustrated with a political system that seems almost totally ineffective and seems to believe that re-presenting the same old plans and money is the answer to preventing the catastrophic decline in our industry and the economy as a whole.

The budget came and went with nothing but a few scraps for the UK’s single most important industry and still we remain on course to lose some 450,000 jobs by the end of 2009!

Instead the Government introduces scrapage schemes to support the sales of foreign produced cars and have the audacity to say that they did this to find favour with those few consumers they interviewed in a series of focus groups. It is clear that the Government is far more interested in sound bite politics that play to the gallery, rather than solving the underlying economic problems, saving UK jobs and fueling the long-term recovery we so desperately need.

Enough is enough. We need urgent action before it's too late. The time has come for our leaders to stand up and be counted and really deliver a build program based on a cut in VAT, investment in existing homes and 75,000 new social homes.