Giving a backbencher the housing brief is unlikely to end the crisis If a company got through 14 chief executives in 20 years, it might be fair to ask whether it was in crisis. In any case, it would appear a miserable, dysfunctional place to work. So pity the newest housing minister, Kris Hopkins, who this week became the 14th one since 1993; the third Conservative minister in as many years, while Labour had nine in 13 years. Mr Hopkins has taken over from Mark Prisk, who this week became the latest victim of the curse of the housing minister's job. Mr Prisk moved to the brief a year ago from the Business department, where he was construction minister. He was a quieter and more serious chap than his pugnacious predecessor, Grant Shapps, and didn't get off to the best start in his new department. He told colleagues that he wasn't interested in Shapps-style "knockabout." He didn't want to help with mischievous stories about his former boss, Vince Cable. Instead, this new housing minister just wanted to get enough homes built. This lofty ambition made Mr Prisk popular with the housing sector, while colleagues nicknamed him "the invisible minister." "Is Mark Prisk still alive?" a cheeky MP joked to me, adding: "Mind you, that probably means he'll end up becoming prime minister without any of us noticing." His unceremonious dumping this week put an end to that inexorable rise. It's rumoured he didn't like the controversial Help to Buy scheme, but he also didn't fit the bill of the "flat cap reshuffle." "Been asked to step aside from Housing for a younger generation," he tweeted after being sacked (although, awkwardly, his successor is just a year or so younger). Privately, Mr Prisk was livid. But the small age gap isn't the only awkward thing about this appointment. Kris Hopkins, well-liked by the leadership as a talented Northerner, has come from the back benches into the most junior ministerial job possible: a parliamentary under-secretary. This promotion might be incredibly exciting for him, but it's a demotion for Housing, since Mr Prisk was a minister of state. No 10 dismisses this as mere semantics. But the fact remains that a job previously attached to the Cabinet has now gone to a backbencher with no government experience. Mr Hopkins may be the housing sector's messiah, or he might just be a very naughty boy, but there's no way of knowing because he's never been a minister before. Surely this says something about the Government's ambition for housing? A lack of drive would be all right if everything were fine and dandy with the sector. But it isn't. The number of homes completed in England in 2012/13 was the lowest since records began, with just 107,820 built. Housing starts for 2012/13 were the third lowest since records began, at 101,640. Yet historically, the Tory party has been very ambitious on housing. Long before Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy empowered a new generation of voters, Harold Macmillan met a target of building 300,000 new homes a year that was set not by ministers but Conservative activists at their 1950 conference. The party had promised to build more homes than Labour, but members wanted a figure. They won a vote setting it, and Macmillan hit that target, a year ahead of schedule. A sceptical Churchill had told him that "it is a gamble - it will make or mar your political career." It did the former, but Macmillan's inexorable rise from housing minister to prime minister isn't being repeated today. Perhaps it's easier to move ministers out of a crisis-beset brief when the crisis in question is a slow, gelatinous one. Some crises, like the death of a child known to social services, are explosive and demand urgent change. Others build up slowly, like oil dripping slowly from a tank; easier to ignore, but no less pernicious. And making housing a testing ground for inexperienced newcomers isn't a fail-safe way of solving this crisis.