Gideon Salutin is a senior researcher at the Social Market Foundation.
In the post-war era, British Conservatives carried election after election by brandishing their housing credentials. In 1951, Winston Churchill outflanked Clement Atlee by promising to build more homes at a quicker pace, and after taking power they hit their target, securing the issue as a vote winner to last through thirteen years in power.
When it comes to housing, last week’s Conservative manifesto will be viewed as a missed opportunity. While right-wing parties around the world are gaining traction by voicing legitimate and widespread frustration with the housing market, Britain’s Tories opted to stay the course. “Steady as she goes,” you can picture the Prime minister saying.
Most housing policies in the manifesto can be broken down into two categories: the dead and the dying.
Let’s start with the dead: this Conservative campaign is resurrecting old policies like a tired film franchise bringing back characters they killed off two movies ago.
Help-to-buy loans may ring a bell with voters; they were presented as the flagship policy for Tories interested in homeownership in the mid-2010s. These loans were designed to offset high deposits by covering up to 20 per cent of home values, rising to 40 per cent in London.
But the programme was eventually cancelled after the Financial Conduct Authority warned beneficiaries were at greater risk of negative equity, and a House of Lords report claimed it had inflated prices by more than the loan was worth in high-demand areas.
Plans for the resurrection are murky; how policymakers would avoid its historical problems, and how they would handle key details like interest rates, remain a mystery.
Ditto the Renters’ Reform Bill, which eventually fell victim to the early election call after various Tory MPs blocked it, citing grievances with major 2019 manifesto pledges like ending no-fault evictions. The party may have calculated that excluding the pledge would attract more attention than quietly including it – but there is no reason to think they would pass it the second time around.
Now for the dying. The manifesto promises to simply maintain many policies already on the books.
Temporary increases to the threshold at which homebuyers pay stamp duty would be made permanent. This is positive, as stamp duty tends to obstruct home purchases and gum up the market, but many will be disappointed after hearing the Chancellor had been considering a more drastic reduction in the rate.
Elsewhere the manifesto promises to stay the course on homelessness strategies and social housing, two areas where campaigners are crying out for reform.
Rethinking our approach on these areas and boldly funding new ideas could have inspired confidence that the party could be trusted to help those most in need; a “steady as she goes” approach doesn’t work when your ship is heading over a cliff.
There were some fresh policies worth noting, designed to increase housebuilding. Planning reform may represent the most ambitious change, as the manifesto pledged to fast-track brownfield development and scrap nutrient neutrality rules to build 1.6 million homes over five years. This would outflank Labour (who promised a measly 1.5 million) as Churchill did in 1951.
But these targets remain wishful thinking. They would require building 320,000 homes per year, a target not hit since the mid-1970s, and the private sector has never built more than 226,000 per year.
Similarly, discounting capital gains taxes for landlords selling to their existing tenants sounds promising, but it is minor compared to the scale of the problem required.
The party’s budgeted £20 million per year on the policy which, based on current averages, implies just 1,700 properties per year would benefit from the change; to return to homeownership rates seen twenty years ago, nearly two million are needed.
Last month, the Social Market Foundation published a series of reports researching housing policy around the world. We found political parties taking bold actions to address the housing crisis, including many on the right.
In the United States, cities have accelerated housebuilding by undertaking widespread and exhaustive planning reform without expanding urban sprawl. In France and New Zealand, right wing parties are gaining support by investing in social and affordable housing, while in Canada, we found Housing First being used to bring down homelessness at less cost to the state.
These new policies are being lauded by conservatives abroad, but only briefly mentioned at home. Given the chance to move the debate forward, British policymakers turned back.
Voters have little reason to vote for a party that is championing the same policies that have priced them out of the homeownership dream, forced them to live in drafty rooms, cost them more in rent and housing costs, or stuck them in the revolving door of temporary accommodation.
I’d call it a manifesto stuck in the past, but that would be an insult to the post-war Conservatives who built, brick by brick, so many of this country’s homes.
The post Gideon Salutin: As conservatives overseas go big on housing, the Tory manifesto offers only dead and dying ideas appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Gideon Salutin
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.