One notable moment from the 2024 general election was the surprise success of the Green Party. The party more than doubled their vote to 6.7 percent, with four MPs. This followed a string of successful local election results, which has brought the party a total of 813 councillors.
The party also came in second place in 40 seats in 2024, up from just three in 2019, and they are within a five point swing of an additional five MPs.
For a long time, the political world has treated the Greens as a curiosity with interesting but ‘out there’ ideas. But, as the party’s electoral strength builds, it is worth taking a serious look at their policy offer.
This is particularly important in the housing sector, where their proposals rely on a mix of populist myth-peddling and blunt tools to address one of the most complex crises facing the country.
What do the Greens stand for?
On housing, the Green Party Manifesto in 2024 had four main priorities:
- A Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price Charter with new regulations for housebuilding
- Investing into decarbonising housing
- Delivering 150,000 social homes per year through purchasing existing homes and building new ones, including ending the Right to Buy
- Regulating the private rental sector by allowing local authorities to introduce rent controls, ending ‘no fault’ evictions and introducing private residential tenancy boards to resolve disputes
Many of these policies are sensible, and several are being implemented by the Labour Government, including investment into housing decarbonisation, restricting the Right to Buy, and ending Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions. But the sum of these policies, alongside the Green Party’s actions outside of their manifesto, presents a worrying package which could have unintended consequences.
Stymying delivery
One notable moment of the election campaign was the refusal by the Greens’ co-leader, Carla Denyer, to support a housing target, despite being pressed on this three times by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.
This is particularly problematic given that many of the Green Party’s policies would make housing delivery harder. The Party’s ‘Right Homes etc… Charter’ includes making councils spread development over small sites, which would eliminate economies of scale by larger development. Likewise, a mandate of Passivhaus Standard on all new homes in this charter would put substantial additional costs on construction with few measurable benefits to the Future Homes Standard currently being introduced by the Government.
Government policy should, of course, promote higher regulations and help smaller builders to create a more diverse industry. But mandating these high bars is a blunt tool for a complex problem.
Similarly, while academics argue the definition and the merits of rent controls, it is relatively well-established that the sort of direct control on rent levels suggested by the Greens has a negative impact on housing supply.
Combined with the well-publicised history of Green councillors and MPs opposing new housing in their area, this amounts to a concerted effort to stymy housing supply.
This was also shown in the one recent occasion of sustained Green Party control over a local authority when they led Brighton from 2011 – 2015. Data from the Housing Delivery Test show that, in the aftermath of this control, Brighton only managed to deliver 77% of the homes it needed in 2015 – 2018, well below the 130% average of local authorities nationally. Meanwhile, data from 2019 – 2022, after four years of Labour control, shows the council delivering 130% of the homes required by the Delivery Test.
While many on the left may not be concerned with overall housing delivery, since these are mostly market rate homes from private developers, building these homes is crucial. Not only will this have a positive impact on rent levels, but it will result in more social housing being built, since Section 106 contributions from developers are responsible for delivering nearly half of all affordable and social housing. More private homes is, for now at least, key to more social homes.
Focusing on housing myths
Meanwhile, the Greens have often peddled myths and mistruths in order to avoid focusing on real solutions.
The party’s response to Labour’s announced planning reforms was a perfect encapsulation of this, as the Greens’ Co-leader, Adrian Ramsey, claimed that:
- There were a million empty homes, only a quarter of these are actually long-term empty
- There were a million homes with planning permission that developers were refusing to build while not a straight debunk, a report by the Competition and Markets Authority showed, while developers do engage in a degree of ‘land banking’, this is largely due to uncertainty of a steady supply of homes, a symptom of our broken planning system which Labour seeks to reform.
- That developers intentionally build over-large ‘executive homes’ the average newbuild home is in fact 20% smaller than its counterpart from the 1950s.
Similarly, the Greens’ manifesto included a completely redundant pledge on making developers pay for local infrastructure, which they already do through Section 106.
This was also reflected in Denyer’s answer when quizzed in the aforementioned Laura Kenssberg, where she said:
“The problem is that in so many parts of the country what we’re seeing being built is not what people need. For example what we see are large, out-of-town developments of luxury, executive homes, 4, 5, 6 bed, double garage, and yet no bus service, no doctors or dentists, no more school places. And to be honest they’re not affordable to most of the people living in the area.”
That a key part of a national political party’s housing messaging contains such blatant myths is worrying, and an irresponsible injection into the political discourse.
The allure of populism
But why focus on these areas, rather than have a discussion about the solutions needed?
In part, it may be because the Greens know that their policy platform is not yet one for national government, and so is more of a political document. Rather than providing solutions, it is instead a powerful tool to point fingers and identify ‘baddies’ that their voters can rally against.
This is exactly what its manifesto seeks to do. By advocating for rent controls, impractical or redundant development standards, and action on empty homes, it implies that all of the faults of the housing crisis are down to its ‘villains’, greedy landlords, overseas buyers and corner-cutting developers, and that regulating their activity is all that is needed to fix it.
Opposition allows minor parties the luxury of an incoherent policy platform, but the Greens’ success merits them being taken more seriously. And by playing such obvious political games, they are taking their voters for fools.