Is there hope for housing in the Lib Dems?

2024 has been a year of unprecedented success for the Liberal Democrats. With the party seeing a record 72 MPs elected in July, the party has managed to quickly turn around a decade of difficulties since their time in the coalition government.

With this comes genuine power. The Lib Dems chair three parliamentary select committees, most notably the Health and Social Care Committee. Ed Davey has two regular questions at PMQs, allowing him an avenue to forge a national policy platform.

The Liberal Democrats are also in power across 68 local authorities across the country, covering over 6 million people.   

This success puts the party in an awkward space, and one which the British political system struggles to accommodate, as a true third party, well in advance of Reform or the Greens, but a fair distance from the official opposition.

Where the Lib Dems go next is up for debate. Are they the party of attention-grabbing stunts and comical bar-charts? Or are they a serious contender for government, needing to flip a mere 25 seats to overtake the Conservatives?

When it comes to housing, this duality runs deep.

The detail

The Lib Dems had the most detailed housing proposals of any party at the election, with over 500 words on their plans across housing delivery and homelessness. Their headline pledges were as follows:

• Building 380,000 a year across the UK, including 150,000 social homes a year, majoring on community-lead development
• Banning no-fault evictions, making three-year tenancies the default, and creating a national register of licensed landlords
• Giving local authorities, the powers to end Right to Buy in their areas.
• Ending rough sleeping within the next Parliament
• Abolishing residential leaseholds and capping ground rents to a nominal fee

The full plan is available here, with fair detail on ending rough sleeping and empowering social tenants.

A starkly divided party

Many will be familiar with the Liberal Democrats’ divides over housing delivery, most notably at coming to a head at the party’s 2023 conference, where members defeated a motion supported by the party’s leadership which would have abandoned their target of 380,000 homes.

Some decry the party as a hub for opportunistic ‘NIMBYs’ seeking to oppose all new housing. A quick search of “Liberal Democrats” and “housing” reveals a slew of local opposition to housebuilding since the election, including in the New Forest and South Leicestershire.

But it also brings up cases of Liberal Democrats pushing Labour councils to increase their affordable housing targets in Lambeth and Southwark, highlighting inaction on an abandoned development in Wiltshire, and even facing down opposition to new homes while in administration in  the Cotswolds.

The party’s main housing figures, Vicky Slade and Gideon Amos, also have real housing experience, as a council leader and town planner respectively.

The Lib Dems in Parliament and the delivery dividing line

While some opposition parties like the Conservatives, Reform UK or even the Greens have hit out hard against some of Labour’s housing announcements, the Liberal Democrats have been more reserved in their approach.

In Parliament they have been openly supportive several of the Government’s measures, including welcoming the Government’s Remediation Acceleration Plan and voting for the Renters’ Rights Bill.

The main dividing line which they have so far placed has been on housing delivery. While the party is supportive of increasing housing supply, they have been openly critical of ‘top-down’ housing targets and have instead favoured a community-led approach, with a primary focus of delivering 150,000 social homes a year.

This was reflected most recently in Amos’ response to the Government’s NPPF reforms:

“Top-down planning diktats risk a surge in speculative greenfield permissions of the kind that the Minister is concerned about, for homes that are out of people’s reach. Instead, let us fund, incentivise and focus on the social and affordable homes that we need…”

This may be a popular rallying cry, but it ignores the reality of the past few years.

Opposing ‘top-down’ targets ignores the reality that when the last Government abandoned targets, housebuilding collapsed, and that the new Government’s approach to reinstating these has been followed by new starts increasing.

A target of 150,000 social homes a year, while admirable, ignores the fact that, even going by the more generous measure of ‘affordable homes’,  fewer than a third of this goal are currently being delivered. Using this goal as a reason to oppose new housebuilding in general, without a firm plan to deliver it, is pure opportunism.

And suggesting community-led planning as an alternative ignores the fact that few people outside of a hyper-engaged, largely more privileged minority, get involved in the planning system as it is.

While the Liberal Democrats’ vision for housebuilding may be a principled one, it appears out-of-place amid its largely more pragmatic approach. More importantly, it allows space for MPs, including the party’s Deputy Leader Daisy Cooper, to opportunistically rally against building more homes in their local area.

Is there real hope for the Lib Dems?

Unlike the other opposition parties, the Liberal Democrats have a genuine plan to solve the housing crisis, with a broad policy platform with several good ideas.

In order to have a real impact, however, the party needs to moderate its anti-housing opportunists and play less into the populist rallying cries of more minor parties. Most importantly, it needs to acknowledge that any housing policy needs the keystone of a serious plan for delivery, which recognises both the scale of the challenge and the need for a top-down approach.

More in this series:

• Kemi Badenoch’s shift right bodes ill for housing
• Green populism will not solve the housing crisis
• Reform UK cannot win the argument on housing and migration