This week Labour’s offer on housing came of age.
Labour presented on Sunday and Monday a comprehensive package of policies which reflects both the natural aspiration of many people to own their own home, and the reality that for many the priority for delivering support and security comes through reforming the private rented sector.
Underpinning all this is a commitment to turbo-charge a Labour house building programme, upping previous pledges to commit to ‘start construction on one million new homes by 2020.’
Without this level of ambition, any other policies would be, at best, window dressing.
But with that foundation, Labour’s other announcements can have some real impact. Giving councils the power to give first call to first-time buyers on new homes and giving them a stamp duty holiday will help them get a foot on the housing ladder. Discouraging overseas investors from hoovering up properties off-plan through a stamp duty surcharge and higher council tax will mean more of what is built is available for those first-timers to buy.
This is good politics as well as good policy. Research by Shelter found that 56 per cent of marginal constituencies polled by Lord Ashcroft were ‘housing hotspots’ of very high unaffordability.
But the important element of Labour’s housing policy pledges is that it speaks to all tenures, recognising the reality of voters’ housing situations.
Labour will reform the council housing finance system, so local authorities can borrow to invest in their communities by building homes which are truly affordable, available for social rent.
And it is about time for comprehensive support for millions of private renters. The number of private renters has doubled in the course of the past decade and is now where a majority of under-35s live.
Creating a national register to drive out rogue landlords; banning rip-off letting agency fees; and introducing long-term three-year tenancies which will give renters the stability and certainty which should be the norm, not an exception.
And a cap on excessive rent rises, based on the well-regarded German model regarded by most economists as having done a pretty good job of protecting tenants while not stifling the rental market, will prevent unscrupulous landlords hiking up rents at will.
Conversely, the Tories have literally nothing to say on renting – it was not even mentioned in their manifesto.
Unless it is owner-occupation, the Tories simply do not understand housing. Their half-baked election gimmick of extending right to buy to housing association homes was widely criticised, not least by housing associations which own the houses the Tories want to flog off, and keep them to rent out affordably.
Housing is the Tories Achilles’ heel and this shows in local government. Take Tory Barnet, which has a housing strategy which proposing to build just 42 council homes out of 20,000 new units, and which wants to set rents for their council stock at 80 per cent market value – destroying the concept of council housing in one stroke.
For too long, the national conversation on housing has been exclusively about ownership. Ironically, this tunnel vision, accompanied by the failure to build new stock, has created the situation where it has never looked more out of reach for many.
Our housing market has always needed, but often lacked, a balanced, cross-tenure approach. Labour’s new pledges recognise this, and the fact that – by working to improve the supply and conditions of homes for social and private rent – that home-ownership can become more achievable for those that aspire to it, not less.
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Mike Katz is a member of Progress. He tweets @MikeKatz
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