Author: Alex Toal

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Labour’s opportunity to disrupt housing taxation

HM Treasury Entrance sign by HM Treasury is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Economic management is quickly becoming the defining factor of this Government. Penned in by tax pledges, and with less room to borrow than previous administrations, the choices which it is making to free up funding for cash-starved public services is having severe political effects.

Increases in employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs), a freeze in Personal Independence Payments (PIP), and limiting the eligibility of the Winter Fuel Allowance have all been deeply unpopular and cut through with voters.

 Creative solutions to find money are required, and looking at the antiquated way in which housing is taxed could not only free up more money for public services, but result in direct cash benefit for lower income households.  

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How do we currently tax housing?

Broadly in the UK housing is taxed in three ways.

First, all voters pay a portion of the value of their house in council tax (total value: £32.7bn/year). The calculations around council tax are somewhat byzantine. Rather than being directly proportional to property values, homes are put into ‘bands’ based on the value of the home in 1991 and have taxes levied on them on this basis. A home worth £320,000 in my home borough of Haringey, for instance, pays 1.4% of its value every year in council tax, while one valued at £68,001 pays 3.2%.

These taxes have also exacerbated existing regional inequalities, with households in the North East paying 18% more than households in London after years of successive increases, despite the fact that house prices have increased in London and the South East significantly more than they have in the North in this time.

Home buyers also pay a portion of the value of their new home in Stamp Duty (total value: £11.6bn/year). Stamp Duty is widely criticised as a tax on housing mobility, rather than a tax on housing wealth, which disincentivises moves such as downsizing, which could have a positive effect on the overall housing market.

Finally, Inheritance Tax (IHT, total value £6bn/year) is increasingly a tax on housing as the value of homes has increased and the threshold for paying IHT has been frozen since 2010. The number of estates liable for IHT has increased from 15,000 in 2009/10 to 27,800 in 2021/2, the percentage of estates paying IHT is estimated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies to increase from 4% currently to 7% in 2032.

Both council tax and inheritance tax are rated by voters as among the most unpopular according to polling by YouGov, with 45% of voters perceiving them as unfair.

How could these be reformed?

All three of these taxations are ripe for reform, and tackling unpopular levies is a clear way for Labour to show itself as embracing its change mantra and challenging existing unfair structures.

But doing so will inevitably create losers as well as winners, and so any changes must be carefully thought through.

Commonly-suggested ideas for council tax reform, for instance, have included updating the valuations from their 1991 basis, and making them directly proportional to property value, rather than putting homes in crude bands. Reforming council tax would disproportionately benefit the poorest households, but some poorer households, particularly living in London’s warped housing market, would also be liable for higher bills.

Meanwhile, reforming Stamp Duty would likely lead to lower receipts in the short-term but have a more positive impact in the long run. Ideas for this have included introducing an option to defer payments over a longer period as part of a gradual move to levy a much smaller rate annually, rather than to levy higher charges at the point of sale.

Doing so would both benefit younger people more likely to be making their first purchase, as well as older people looking to downsize, but making the final move to an annual levy on all homes would have substantial political risk.

Tackling IHT may be considerably simpler. Of the 27,800 estates which paid IHT in 2021/2, the 3,153 estates worth over £2 million paid over half of the £6 billion collected in that year. Introducing graded bands for estates under this level, while levying higher taxes on this upper level would give a default tax cut to tens of thousands of people a year during one of the most emotionally difficult times of their life, while shifting the burden to a group most would see as super-rich.

However, the Government’s recent moves with tapering IHT zero-rating for farms and businesses has shown that any tinkering with so-called ‘death taxes’, even when levied on households with higher levels of assets, can be politically dangerous. So even this taxing double-millionaires at a higher rate may well have political risks.

None of these options are necessarily easy, but in a time of increased fiscal strain and in the aftermath of a number of politically difficult tax rises, creative thinking around taxation is more important than ever. And, as the housing market continues to represent a substantial source of wealth, how this is taxed in a sustainable fashion needs to be in our national discussion.   

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Labour’s Planning Bill is the keystone of its housing delivery plans

Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner NPPF visit by No. 10 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

On Monday 24th March, the most ambitious planning reform in a generation will be debated in the House of Commons. Labour’s’ Planning and Infrastructure Bill is the latest in a number of changes to the planning system, and will be central to the Government’s plan to deliver 1.5 million homes over this Parliament.

What does the Planning and Infrastructure Bill do?

The remit of the Bill goes well beyond housing and targets the planning obstacles to delivery in a number of key areas:

  • Simplifying the approval process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs), including by reducing consultation requirements for these.
  • Establishing a Nature Restoration Fund for developers to pay into to address issues like nutrient neutrality.
  • Compulsory Purchase reform, so that councils can acquire land for social housing at existing use value rather than inflated ‘hope’ value.
  • Reforming planning committees, including the introduction of compulsory training and a delegation scheme to empower non-political council officers to make more decisions.
  • Introducing sub-regionally developed Spatial Development Strategies to encourage councils to work across their borders.

The Bill also has a number of other measures such as the devolution of planning fees, and reforming and strengthening development corporations to make their roll-out easier.

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How will this address the housing crisis?

In essence, the Bill eliminates some important reasons for which homes do not make it through the consenting process, or are stalled after approval.

For instance, introducing a Nature Restoration Fund will help to unlock 160,000 homes blocked by nutrient neutrality rules.

Reforming Compulsory Purchase Orders will also make it easier for local authorities to deliver council homes. Hope value can inflate agricultural land by as much as 275 times its existing value, and can result in councils having to decrease the percentage of social homes on a site.

Measures around spatial development strategies and reforming committees should also help to resolve issues where large sites are made more contentious due to the lack of existing infrastructure. By ensuring that councils are coordinating across boundaries to provide key services, and by ensuring that more decisions are made by council officers, political factors should play less of a role in discretionary planning decisions.  

A keystone to other Labour’s plans:

The Bill cannot be seen in isolation, and instead has to be viewed as part of a package of measures which the Government is using to achieve a much-needed uplift in housing delivery.

It comes alongside an update to the National Planning Policy Framework, which restored and strengthened housing targets, alongside allocating low-quality ‘grey belt’ land for high quality developments with affordable and social housing and the enrichment of green space.

There have also been a number of reforms to boost delivery in urban areas, not least the introduction of brownfield planning passports, so that development on brownfield sites automatically goes ahead if it meets local planning requirements. Also in this category are plans to allow for ‘zoning’ around train stations.

Finally, the Government has added £800 million to the Affordable Homes Programme, and refocused it on the delivery of social housing, so that private housebuilding is supplemented with crucial state provision.

Labour’s ‘everything theory of housing’

It was clear from the outset that the Government had a ‘Housing theory of everything’. Solving the housing crisis will be crucial to a number of Labour’s aims to improve living standards, generate growth, and solve the climate crisis, and Labour clearly understands this.

But the way in which they have gone about this programme also shows that they have an ‘everything theory of housing’, using a range of levers to boost delivery, and clearly identifying which issues need solving through primary legislation, which through policy tweaks, and which through further funding.

Doing this alongside passing a generational boost to the rights of private renters, reforming the feudal leasehold system and introducing commonhold as a default tenure, boosting funding for homelessness prevention and setting up a cross-Government homelessness taskforce, increasing resourcing for the Building Safety Regulator and accelerating the remediation of dangerous cladding, investing £3.4 billion into a new Warm Homes Plan, and identifying 100 sites for urban extensions or new towns, shows a Government in hyperdrive to fix this most pressing of crises.

Planning reforms have so far primarily addressed stalled housing delivery in exurban and rural areas, where delivering new homes is, in theory, easiest. Going forward, the Government also needs to tackle other critical barriers to building new homes, such as the cost of building homes, and the construction sector’s skills shortage, not to mention issues around densification and regeneration or urban sites. Looking ahead to the Comprehensive Spending Review, finding ways to support councils building as has been laid out in Red Brick’s 10-year plan for housing series will be welcome to boost much-needed council homes.

But, for the present, the Second Reading debate of the Bill on 24th March should provide an opportunity to celebrate legislation which will meaningfully contribute to ending the housing crisis, and to make the case for how important it will be going forwards for this to remain at the top of the Government’s agenda.

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Focusing on enforcement and how Labour can embrace disruption from government

Image by Sébastian Dah is licensed under Creative Commons
Image by Sébastian Dah is licensed under Creative Commons

The past few weeks have shown just how much Donald Trump’s return to the White House has disrupted politics globally. At home, the new President has been a bull in the china shop of the US Government, freezing programmes and firing thousands of staff with little clear rationale. Abroad, the biggest realignment of geopolitics has occurred, with the US all but switching sides in the conflict in Ukraine and Trump’s Vice President JD Vance haranguing the principles of liberal democracy at the Munich Security Conference.

Meanwhile, the new administration’s manic energy of disruption has been felt as Reform UK have soared to first place in opinion polling, and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) secured their best election result.

It is clear that there is an appetite in the electorate for speed, disruption, and a reset. Patience for norms or rules has eroded, and a desire for change, which Labour capitalised on in their 2024 election victory, is still burning bright.

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But embracing this appetite in Government is hard, particularly with the circumstances of Labour’s win. Labour now has an insurmountable majority in parliament, backed up with Labour mayors in all but one Combined Authority, and is even the largest party in local government. If there is anything which Labour cannot do, it is likely to appear to the electorate that it is through a lack of political will, rather than through the many obstacles which still exist.

And these hurdles are real indeed. As Andy Bates recently pointed out, the social housing sector is a web of housing associations and local authorities, who have at best a loose sense of accountability through grant funding or elected members respectively. But this can be extended even more when considering the whole housing ecosystem of developers, contractors, freeholders, regulators, and landlords. There are tens of thousands of organisations who are involved in delivering the Government’s housing missions, but who do not always share the Government’s motivation.

It is with this in mind that focusing on these organisations can not only be a political opportunity for Labour, but can also expose the flaws in the system which legislation can fix.

Picking fights on behalf of constituents against seemingly unaccountable bodies is clearly good politics. Not only that, but if done with sufficient force it can actually yield results.

This has most clearly been seen recently in the over 100-strong group of Labour MPs holding managing agents to account, who have already secured several concessions from FirstPort, the largest managing agent in the country, including meetings with residents so that FirstPort can be held to account on an estate-by-estate basis.

But it also offers the opportunity to expose just how lacking the regulatory state is in its ability to ensure compliance with existing rules, let alone new legislation.

Quality issues on many newbuild estates are famously documented, from faulty sewage systems to holes willed with disposable coffee cups. Meanwhile, existing private rental sector regulation, such as the Homes (Fit for Human Habitation) Act remain blatantly unenforced in thousands of properties across the country. Recently, the UK’s burgeoning Building Safety Regulator has seen significant teething problems as it enforces much-needed regulations on high rise buildings, with 86% of building control ‘Gateway 2’ application rejected.

Labour is pushing through ambitious programmes of reform in the private rental sector with the Renters’ Rights Bill, newbuild standards with the Future Homes Standard, and reforms to the feudal leasehold system with a new Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill, alongside the arduous process of implementing the previous Government’s poorly written and loophole-ridden Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act.

The common theme across all of this legislation, however, is that enforcing these new rules is going to be a significant challenge. Nearly half of housebuilders have reported that they are ready for the Future Homes Standard. Meanwhile, new standards in the Renters’ Rights Bill such as Awaab’s Law, will only be online in the social housing sector in October of this year, after receiving Royal Assent in July 2023.

Why this is so widespread is more difficult to diagnose. Depending on the sector, the weight and speed of new regulations, lack of capacity in enforcement authorities, a lack of engagement and transparency with industry, or simply organisational complacency, can be contributing factors, and that is even before considering the difficult financial situations facing many local authorities, housing associations, and even developers.

By calling out, meeting with and working to improve the performance of organisations and individuals who provide and maintain our housing, Labour politicians have the opportunity to vocally stand up on constituents’ behalf, to achieve real outcomes, and also investigate first-hand the deficiencies of the regulatory state.

The bold reforms which Labour MPs are pushing through in Parliament will only matter if they can actually be enforced. And, by embracing the spirit of disruption and calling out the organisations directly responsible for their constituents’ housing, they have the opportunity to embrace the agenda driving forces of populism across the world and utilise it for good.

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Rachel Reeves’ war on uncertainty

Today, Chancellor Rachel Reeves set out the Government’s plans to promote growth and to kickstart the UK’s economy after a decade of stagnation under the Conservatives.

This followed recent announcements from the Government over the weekend which caused a stir across the housing world. First, Reeves announced a plan to introduce a “zoning scheme”, with a presumption in favour of development around train stations to allow homes to be built faster and without unnecessary barriers. And Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook announced a White Paper on Planning and Infrastructure which reduced the extent to which nationally significant infrastructure projects would have to consult with a broad range of stakeholders.

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It is clear that stability and certainty is one of the Government’s main arguments for the UK to be an attractive investment destination. With an unpredictable Trump across the Atlantic, and political instability across Europe, Labour’s sizeable majority and loyal party makes the UK a rare island of (relative) calm.

This stability is clearly being driven from Reeves, famously an accomplished chess player, a game whose stability derives from the fact that it only has three variables: the two players participating and which one begins.

In comparison, our planning system currently resembles more a game of Monopoly, driven by the randomness of dice throws, which card you pick out from the Chance pack, and how happy Uncle Greg is with the Christmas present you gave him. The success of a project can rely on a myriad of factors from the personalities of council officers, the reaction of statutory consultees like fire services and environmental bodies, whether the application is close to an election which may make committee members nervous, and whether objectors have the resources to launch a legal challenge. This uncertainty can hold up even the most basic project by months if not years, leading to added costs and less certainty.

The UK’s discretionary planning system is also increasingly an outlier, with most comparable countries instead opting for a zoning system, where projects are approved more by the letter and less by the interpretation of existing rules. If a housing project is promoted in an area designated for housing, it has to fulfil a set of requirements and is then good to go.

In response to this, the Government’s actions seem to attempt to create something closer to a zoning system, particularly in places where the argument for new homes is strongest; they are introducing planning passports for brownfield sites, releasing ‘grey belt’ land under ‘golden rules’ of development, reducing the extent to which judicial review can hold back housing projects, and increasing the amount of delegation to officers from planning committees.

This is all good as far as certainty is concerned. Fewer vetos within the planning system will create greater stability and expectation of a return on investment for people investing money into new housing. At the very least, this will mean that new homes get built faster. An optimistic take would also say that if investors are surer of their returns they will be more able to set aside money for infrastructure investment around new homes, and providing affordable and social housing alongside homes for private sale.

But, as encouraging as these steps are, it is uncertain how many new homes they will deliver in the long-term, with planning departments still under-resourced, developers weighed down with new environmental and quality standards, and delivery in urban areas hampered with significant viability challenges.

While Rachel Reeves may have claimed a few victories in the war on uncertainty, a few major campaigns await.

A final, implementable version of the Future Homes Standard is needed, so that developers have a clear idea of the environmental standard for new homes and adapt accordingly.

Work needs to be done to smooth the operations of the Building Safety Regulator, which is still rejecting 86% of Gateway 2 applications (at building control stage). An active approach needs to be taken to ensure that the BSR provides clear guidelines, advice and feedback, and to resource them to provide swift and clear verdicts.

And considerable work needs to be done around viability, so that developers and local authorities have a clear understanding of what can be delivered on individual urban sites, how much social housing can be provided from day one, and how long projects will take.

All of this is even before considering more major questions around housing. How can the myriad of documents developers need to submit be simplified? How can local authority and housing association development capacity be increased to deliver the social homes we sorely need? And what work is needed to challenge our existing model of speculative development, to modernise construction practices, and to encourage smaller sites and diversity in the housebuilding sector?

While the economic winds may be challenging for the Government, housing is its one place where it is forging a strong path. Builders are projecting an increase of new homes, including of social and affordable housing, and the industry as a whole is fully behind Labour’s plans.

But, in order to turn this mood music into a plan for 1.5 million homes, the Government needs to grasp the nettle of all causes of uncertainty, and work to create a stable environment for new homes. 

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Is there hope for housing in the Lib Dems?

Ed Davey & SSEs Paul Smith by Department of Energy and Climate Change is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

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.

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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.

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Kemi Badenoch’s shift right bodes ill for housing

Kemi Badenoch MP (North West Essex, Conservative) by House of Commons is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The 2024 general election saw the worst result for the Conservative Party in terms of share of seats and votes since its formation in the nineteenth century.

But the Conservatives’ failure should not preclude their return. Only three Conservative leaders have failed to become prime minister, and some recent polls have already put them ahead of Labour. Even a minor swing could put them back in power, with Kemi Badenoch as prime minister.

Badenoch served as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government between the election and her victory in the Conservative leadership contest, and so we know more about her housing positions than other aspects of her views. And her approach so far demonstrates a worrying drift to the right.

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Shifting right on renters’ reform

One of the biggest disappointments of the last Government was a failure to pass the Renters’ Reform Bill. In ending Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions and bringing in new standards to the private rented sector, the legislation would have been life-changing for millions of private renters.

While Badenoch served in administrations which introduced this legislation, she quickly pivoted after the election to oppose Labour’s Renters’ Rights Bill, which is very similar to the Conservatives’ Bill.

Speaking at the Bill’s Second Reading, she parroted the talking points of landlord lobby groups that the bill would reduce the availability of homes in the private rental sector, while failing to discuss where those homes would go.

This potential tilt away from renters’ rights was further reinforced by Badenoch’s pick for Shadow Housing Minister: Kevin Hollinrake. Hollinrake was founder and chair of Hunters’ estate agents until 2021, and was reported to have numbered among the opponents of his own government’s Renters’ Reform Bill in 2023.

Shifting right on housing delivery

Can building homes be left or right wing? Seemingly under Kemi Badenoch it can be, as housing has become part of her wider ideological conflict with the left.

This has manifested in her blaming left wing administrations in urban centres and the bureaucratic ‘deep state’ for a failure to build the homes we need.

The former continues a long-standing trend of Conservatives trying to disproportionately focus construction in urban areas.

This is for a brazenly political reason: Conservatives have long abandoned metropolitan voters and are happy to concentrate in these areas the disruption caused by building more homes. Accordingly, in 2021 they introduced a somewhat arbitrary 35% “urban uplift” to the 20 most densely populated towns and cities outside of London, and, in 2024 Michael Gove launched a review of Sadiq Khan’s London Plan as a way to criticise the mayor for failing to deliver enough homes.

Badenoch has also continued this tradition, attacking Khan on a similar basis in three of her eight speeches as Shadow Housing Minister.

Similarly, while Badenoch has made pleas to protect the green belt, she has simultaneously started to champion a deregulatory planning policy with measures to “roll back the environmental laws, the diversity and social requirements”, blaming the bureaucratic state for the failures to build more homes.

This is a disappointing hallmark of the Conservatives’ housing policy. While the party failed to meet their own housing targets, before ditching them entirely to appease ‘NIMBY’ backbenchers, their only real solution for the lack of delivery in urban areas has been, and continues to be under Badenoch, to blame local leaders.

Shifting right on migration

A further worrying trend of Badenoch’s tenure as Shadow Housing Minister has been a shift to blame migration for the increase in rent levels, stating that “The only way to improve the lives of [private renters] is to control immigration and build more homes, particularly in high-demand areas like Inner London.”

This is not a far cry from Reform UK’s dishonest blaming migrants for the lack of social housing. Unlike Reform’s argument, which is based purely on falsehood, there is some truth to the idea that any new entrants into the private rental sector will increase demand, whatever their country of origin.

However, this is only part of the picture. Migrants already have significant barriers to renting privately, including language barriers, difficulty finding guarantors, and Right to Rent checks, and so landlords when surveyed admit that they are less likely to rent to someone without a British passport. As a 2017 briefing from the House of Commons Library states:

“Research suggests that new migrants often enter the PRS in areas of low demand, filling less desirable property left by individuals moving into better housing. This may be because some groups of migrants only have access to low-paid or insecure work, but it also reflects variations in perceptions of standards and personal priorities.”

As John Perry notes, this also means that foreign nationals are more likely to live in sub-standard accommodation, the regulation of which Badenoch strongly opposes.

While Badenoch is still new in position, the direction of her housing policy so far demonstrates a concerning shift to the right, with renters, migrants and the environment thrown under the bus. This divisive rhetoric is simply a distillation of the arguments made by the Conservatives in government, and a worrying sign that Badenoch has learned little from the lessons of the past.

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Green populism will not solve the housing crisis

Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, co-leaders of the Green Party, with Elllie Chowns, Housing and communities spokesperson. Image by Bristol Green Party licensed under public domain

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.

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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.

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Reform UK cannot win the argument on housing and migration

Nigel Farage MP (Clacton, Reform UK) by House of Commons is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

One of the surprises of the 2024 general election was Reform UK’s first real success at a Westminster election. Few would have guessed that Nigel Farage would be finally elected after seven attempts at Parliament, fewer that he would be joined by four Reform UK colleagues. Even more notable is that they came second in 98 (mostly Labour) constituencies, with 13 within a five percentage point swing.

Whether we like it or not, beating a currently minor party with little record or accountability will be a crucial part of securing the next Labour win at the general election. We have to take on the far right.

When it comes to housing this is particularly important, as Reform UK’s platform is as divisive as it is ineffective. So, what is Reform UK’s platform and why should it worry us?

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What does Reform UK stand for on housing?

Reform’s housing policy is relatively detailed, including:

  • ‘Loose fit planning’ policy for large developments, alongside brownfield passports to fast-track housing on urban land.
  • A “UK Connection test” for social housing so that “foreign nationals must go to the back of the queue. Not the front.”
  • Abolishing Section 24, which limits the amount of tax relief landlords can get on their residential properties.
  • Abolish the (then) Renters’ Reform Bill.
  • Minor reforms to leasehold to provide more clarity over charging and reduce the cost of renewing leases.
  • Modernise innovative construction practices.

Migration is not the problem

Key to Reform UK’s housing policies, and broader argument, is the myth that migrants take up an unfair share of UK social housing.

Since their election, several of Reform UK MPs have submitted questions regarding how many asylum seekers are being housed in social housing in their constituencies, only to be corrected by the Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook that asylum seekers are ineligible for social housing due to having no recourse to public funds.

This is an oft-touted myth on the far right, that all social housing is allocated more favourably towards non British nationals. This has been debunked in a number of ways:

  • Currently 90% of social housing residents are UK nationals, the same as their makeup of the national population.
  • 17% of people born in the UK live in social housing, compared to 18% of people not born in the UK.
  • Even if you want to take Reform UK’s bait of ‘non UK nationals’ meaning people outside of the ‘White British’ ethnicity classification, this is also untrue. The social housing survey shows that White British people are actually more likely to be in social housing than other ethnicities, comprising 77.6% of new tenures compared to 74.4% of the population.

This myth needs to be called out for what it is – a divisive attempt to create a bogeyman to justify the positions of Farage and his colleagues.

Caving in to vested interests

While claiming to stand up for the ‘little guy’ with this allocations policy, the rest of Reform UK’s platform is a clear pandering to those all benefitting from the housing crisis.

This is something which Reform UK is proud of, with Reform candidate David McLennan  saying during the election campaign “We’re very much a landlords’ party”. This is true in more than one sense, with former Deputy Leader Ben Habib CEO of First Property Group and current Deputy Leader and MP Richard Tice still listed as a Partner at Quidnet Capital, a real-estate focused investment group.

Meanwhile, their tax policy heavily favours those with already substantial funds, including eliminating stamp duty for properties below £750,000 (over twice the national average), raising the Inheritance Tax threshold fourfold to £2m, and abolishing Section 24.

Not only would this benefit landowners in general, but specifically landlords. This has been backed up by the party’s opposition to the Renters’ Rights Bill, which eliminates Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions while keeping a number of routes for landlords to evict unruly tenants, and implements basic standards of accountability to the sector.

Finally, while the party may have a fig leaf to increasing home-building, the actions of Reform MPs have clearly shown a pandering to their most NIMBY instincts. This has manifested in a number of written questions to Ministers including about:

A charlatan’s charter

It is clear from their policy platform that Reform UK have no serious plan to solve the housing crisis. Instead, their policy is based on clear disinformation, that migration is to blame for the UK’s housing shortage and that a pure deregulatory agenda will fix it.

Instead, they represent at best a lobby group for those whose interests lie in keeping the housing crisis unsolved, seeking to milk the housing crisis for all that it’s worth while failing to come up with any real solutions.

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The Autumn Budget: What is in it for housing?

The Chancellor visits Liverpool by HM Treasury is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Today was a first in a number of ways. It marked the first Labour budget in fourteen years, and the first budget ever delivered by a female Chancellor.

But it is also the most ambitious set of measures for the housing sector in quite some time, with a number of policies contained designed to get Britain building, deliver the next generation of social housing, and address some of the stark inequalities in the housing system as a whole.

Investing in delivery

The past few years have seen a slump in affordable housebuilding, particularly in the areas of highest need, with the number of homes started by London-based housing associations down by 92% this year. This is due to a number of reasons, including the increased cost of building, and also a focus on the sector’s existing stock after the passage of much-needed regulation including Awaab’s Law and the Building Safety Act.

It was therefore pleasing to see that one of the headline announcements from the Budget was a £500m top-up to the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP). This was a programme started under the last Government to deliver £11.5bn of funding to the affordable housing sector from 2021 – 26.

The additional £500m represents a 10% per annum increase in the value of the fund from 2025-6, which will be particularly useful given the aforementioned pressures on registered providers, and should hopefully allow them to top-up existing project funding as well as starting new ventures.  This funding is also boosted by the confirmation of a five-year rent settlement for social housing providers, under which their rents will be able to increase by CPI +1%. This will provide much needed certainty to the sector after years of more haphazard policymaking.

What’s more, this budget saw additional funding dedicated towards more general housing delivery, including:

  • £3bn in support and guarantees to increase the supply of homes and support small housebuilders.
  • £128m to new housing projects to support the deliver of 33,000 homes
  • A £36m investment in the planning system to boost local authority skills provision, including recruiting the 300 new planners promised in Labour’s manifesto.
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Bringing existing homes up to date

The UK famously has among the oldest and leakiest housing stock in Europe. This is consequential for a number of reasons: consumers’ bills are higher, buildings emit more carbon, and homes are worse for residents’ health.

This budget saw a clear effort to address that, with a £3.4 billion investment into the government’s new Warm Homes Programme as part of the Government’s mission to bring all homes up to EPC C by 2030.

This programme will be transformational for consumers. It will significantly reduce bills and with it emissions from the built environment, and much of the retrofitting work entailed will have knock-on benefits for resident’s health.  

Particularly welcoming was the £1bn dedicated to cladding remediation – this has been called for by those trapped in unsafe blocks and will meaningfully accelerate the removal of dangerous cladding.

Severely restricting the Right to Buy

The Right to Buy, the policy which enables council tenants to buy their homes at a discounted rate, has often been criticised as an unhelpful drain on social housing at the time when lists of people applying for social housing are at their highest. Since discounts were increased by the coalition in 2012, this scheme has accelerated to seeing 10,000 – 12,000 homes lost per year, which are often difficult to replace.

After a review over the summer, this budget saw the government confirm their intention to heavily reduce discounts for the Right to Buy scheme, alongside increasing the time period for a which a tenant has had to live in, and providing additional exemptions for newly built council homes.

This not only undoes some of the worst reforms made under the Coalition Government but places brand new restrictions on the Right to Buy, and so there is hope that sales may dip even below the rates of 4,000 – 5,000 seen in the latter years of the Blair-Brown Governments.

It has also been confirmed that councils will keep 100% of the receipts from sales, making it easier for them to build new homes to supplement those lost from the scheme.

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Taxing housing more fairly

Finally, the budget sought to change the perverse incentives which help to drive inequality in the housing market. At present, many landlords buy up property in the private rental sector as an investment, and happily admit to seeing themselves more as investors than as professional landlords. Similarly, those who are at the lucky enough to own their own homes are able to pass a substantial amount of the value of that home to their children upon death, dividing Britain starkly between those with family property and those without.

This budget saw moves to amend this inequality, with stamp duty rates for second home and capital gains tax increased, while income tax thresholds will be unfrozen from 2028. This marks a substantial change in the tax system to prioritise those seeking to get onto the housing ladder at the expense of those who earn more than property, either as a property owner or as a landlord, while supporting those who derive income from work.

Welcome progress, but more funding will be needed

All of the money delivered in this budget is welcome, and sorely needed. But more will still be needed to achieve the government’s housing goals.

The National Housing Federation has estimated that £4.6bn per year will be needed to deliver the step change in affordable housing needed to meet Labour’s manifesto goals, nearly double of the programme inherited from the Tories.

More investment is also always welcome in directly preventing and tackling homelessness, and in reviving the Supporting People Programme ended by the Tories, but which was estimated to generate £2 for every £1 spent in supporting social housing residents.

Ministers have indicated that this is only the start of Labour’s plans to drive investment in the economy, and we will have to look to the Spending Review taking place over the winter for signals of what departmental budgets will look like in the coming years. Key priorities will be ensuring that the Local Housing Allowance and housing benefit continue to be uprated so that those at the sharpest end of the housing crisis have the support they need.

But the sector must continue to call for these changes and the spending needed to support the government’s aim of ending the housing crisis.

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How social landlords can support residents and reduce health inequalities

A great deal of the conversation in housing policy often rightly revolves around how we build and maintain the homes we need.

But for many social housing providers, getting residents into new homes is just the start of the journey. In 2024, this has proven to be the case more than ever. With the acute shortage of social housing meaning that those who are able to make it off tortuous waiting lists and into secure tenancies are more likely to be in a vulnerable position and require active wellbeing support from their landlord.

I spoke with Connie Jennings, Director of Stronger Communities at whg, a social landlord based primarily in Walsall with homes across the Midlands, about what social landlords can do to directly address issues of resident health outcomes. She portrayed a challenging landscape for many of those who find themselves in need of social housing.

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Over half of social housing residents in England live in the 30% most deprived neighbourhoods and healthy life expectancy for people living in these communities is almost 20 years shorter than the UK average. They are more likely to be underserved by existing healthcare infrastructure, due to carriers such as transport or language , and are increasingly likely to be disenfranchised by moves to digitise healthcare provision. This can lead to an increasing number of social housing residents going straight to A&E because they find it harder to book GP appointments.

In response to this, whg is deploying targeted, evidence-based and person-centred approaches. In Connie’s experience, “working with housing is the best way to connect with  to this group of people”. She presented the issue of diabetes, which disproportionately impacts Walsall’s South Asian population, some of whom live in whg properties. Local healthcare providers previously attempted to reach local communities to get them to engage with diabetes services through traditional means, such as putting leaflets through doors, but this had a minimal impact. So whg recruited a number of “Community  Champions’ from among their residents with relevant cultural experience and language skills to engage with their neighbours and spread awareness and connect residents with diabetes healthcare services.  .

As Connie pointed out, “The system expects those with the least to jump through the most hoops to get to the services most of us take for granted”. Landlords like whg can help residents to jump through such hoops, such as providing more elderly residents with digital inclusion courses so that they can be in touch with their relatives over Zoom.

Key to whg’s success in this area, in Connie’s mind, is the housing association’s place-based nature, with a large number of  whg properties being in the Walsall area. This has allowed them to build up a relationship with the integrated care partnership and to sit on the local NHS Partnership Board. Rather than investing in multiple contacts across multiple councils, whg is able to focus most of its attention in this single local area.

One issue in many local authorities is a lack of joined-up working between departments within councils, and between local authorities and housing associations, GPs, or schools in their area. This leaves residents having to deal with a range of contacts in the public sector, or in another case one service finding it hard to reach a resident who may be in regular contact with another part of the state. whg aims to reduce this complexity, for instance all of their Wellbeing Schemes for people aged 55+ have  a dedicated Wellbeing Officer on site to support residents. I asked Connie how whg were able to dedicate funding towards this when that many housing associations are facing tighter budgets due to increased costs from building safety or decarbonisation work. Connie attributed this in part due to whg’s long-term organisational culture which prioritises customer wellbeing in the same way they prioritise building safety and carbon reduction, with ring-fenced funding in the organisation’s 2030 plan to carry on this work.

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Thinking about more than just an organisation’s bottom line also has more beneficial long-term financial consequences. Interventions to improve a resident’s mental health could generate a social value of £36,000. And Connie pointed to the work of whg’s employment and training team, which has helped 180 residents to work in local NHS hospitals and healthcare teams, addressing a local skills shortage while providing stable work for the residents. In 2023/4, whg generated a social value of £46.4m through a range of actions such as building new homes, helping residents into employment, and providing money advice to households, in turn helping customers to successfully sustain their tenancies and remain in their home .

I asked Connie what the new Labour Government could do to support the work of individuals like her. She pointed to the Supporting People Programme, ring-fenced funding provided to local authorities to help individuals with additional needs to live independently. Subsequent value-for-money analysis commissioned by the then Department for Communities and Local Government showed that the programme had produced benefits totalling £3.41bn per annum against an overall investment of £1.61bn. Looking ahead to the Autumn Budget, Connie noted, “we’ve got to be able to demonstrate the worth of a social housing tenancy. It shouldn’t be a safety net, it should be a trampoline.”

For all of us in the housing sector, it is crucial not just to champion the value of new homes, but that of secure tenancies with responsible landlords who can help to empower residents to take advantage of new opportunities.