Inside Housing – Insight – Exclusive interview with Reform UK’s housing spokesperson Simon Dudley

“Extracting Grenfell from the statistics, actually people dying in house fires is rare,” he argues. “Many, many more people die on the roads driving cars, but we’re not making cars illegal, so why are we stopping houses being built?

“Think about all the human suffering of not having a home, not being able to have children, being stuck with your parents, in your childhood bedroom,” he continues. “You can’t stop tragic things happening. You can try to minimise excesses, but bad things do happen.” (Update, 02.04.26: These comments proved controversial, with Nigel Farage describing them as “deeply inappropriate”. He said that Mr Dudley had been removed from his role. Posting on X this morning, Mr Dudley said: “In no shape or form am I belittling that disaster [Grenfell] or the huge loss of life. It must never happen again.”)

The current regulation and regulator came out of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and were formed under the auspices of his erstwhile colleagues in the Conservative Party: Michael Gove as housing secretary and Theresa May as prime minister. Mr Dudley calls them “decent people”, but clearly sees the approach as misguided.

He is far from alone in thinking that the Building Safety Regulator may need further adjustments, or in being concerned about the impact on development. The question is how that is handled.

We put Mr Dudley’s comment to Eddie Hughes, who was Conservative minister for rough sleeping and homelessness from 2021 to 2022. He later tells Inside Housing: “I’ve been into that building [Grenfell Tower], had a floor-by-floor tour, I’ve sat around the table with the bereaved and survivors, and I think you need kind of exposure to that to understand the delicacy of the topic. However, we still need to build things and we need them to be safe.”

Back in Reform HQ, Mr Dudley says: “The impact of poor regulation is to stop housebuilding in one of the world’s capitals. So the pendulum has just swung too far the wrong way.

“And, frankly, for people who are the architects of things, it’s very difficult for them to put them right. And Reform is not the architect of so many of these failures which our country has now. We will put it right, because we’re not emotionally connected with them. They’re not things that we created. We will fix them.”

What would a Reform fix look like? Mr Dudley responds with a question rather than an answer: “Is it capable of being fixed?” For him, this would mean reform of the regulator so “buildings can proceed and capital can be deployed into a sector in a fast way”. On the other hand, he posits it could be “so rotten that it needs to be changed fundamentally”.

‘Pro-affordable housing’ stance

Given Mr Dudley’s role at Ebbsfleet, what does he think of the government’s New Towns Programme?

“I think they are part of the solution, but only part of it really,” Mr Dudley says. “They take a lot of time. They need a lot of public money, but you know, we’re looking at huge areas like London, where there’s virtually no development going on.”

“Let’s build hundreds of thousands of homes in London, Sadiq Khan,” he says. (He is not a fan of the London mayor. On the Mod Cons Podcast earlier this year, Mr Dudley called Sir Sadiq Khan a “pest”). “This is where the people should be looking, not at seven or eight new towns, which are going to take 30 years to come to fruition.”

“I think [new towns] are part of the solution, but only part of it really”

Reform’s housing spokesperson is pro-housing, but does that make him pro-social housing? Mr Dudley says: “I think we should build lots and lots more homes, yeah, and that will make homes more affordable.”

He does acknowledge the need to build affordable homes, particularly for retirees who haven’t managed to buy a property. But when I ask if Reform would continue the Social and Affordable Homes Programme, which at a duration of 10 years is meant to outlive the current parliament, he doesn’t commit one way or the other.

“I am pro-affordable housing,” he says. “Whether the way that the affordable homes programme – because, remember, I used to chair Homes England – whether that is the right way to do it, or whether there are other ways and you can save some money there. I think we just need to work through all the numbers.”

Quangos to be scrapped?

Despite his time chairing Homes England, Mr Dudley indicates that the agency might be cut or changed under Reform. The body is “good at aggregating land assembly” and “has a lot of very talented people”. On the other hand, he calls it “a big fat quango” and notes it “has ‘X’ number of people earning, you know, over £100,000 a year”.

Instead, he questions whether “it will be more appropriate for part of that business to be disaggregated and put into devolved administrations, where it’s close to locally elected people with a mandate”.