Alex Black is a former Conservative aide.
A big debate is being waged within the Conservative Party on what to do about England’s lack of housebuilding.
Many MPs appear to simply want to hide the issue until after the election, fearing the sheer scale of building required will spark furious constituency objections. Others see declining rates of building as an existential threat for the party, due to a traditional link between home ownership and voting blue.
But what are the actual electorate saying, including in marginal seats? This article uses new polling to shed light on how the party might manage the issue towards the election.
Lack of housing supply is not a new problem. A recent Centre for Cities estimate showed that since around 1950, Britain has built up a structural deficit of around 4.3 million new homes compared to average European building rates.
Today’s problems, including ever-rising pressures on affordability, result from a long-term structural undersupply of new housing stock – and new polling, commissioned from Deltapoll for this article, shows that voters certainly recognise this.
First, housing is seen as a major issue: when asked “what do you think are the most important problems facing the country”, housing ranks higher than education or taxation, and equal to crime. Second, a majority (57 per cent) support “significantly increasing the number of new houses built each year”, compared with just 25 per cent who disagree; a ‘net support’ figure of +32 per cent.
What is interesting is how these numbers break down by constituency. Net support rises dramatically to +48 per cent in the key battleground seats for the party at the next election: the 2019 gains which include the so-called Red Wall, where 67 per cent supported building significantly more, while only 19 per cent opposed it.
Support is lowest, at just 49 per cent, among seats the Conservatives already held before 2019, and many of these MPs were among the rebels who recently forced the Government to halt planning reform and stop pressuring local areas to deliver new development in the volumes needed.
The picture here is clear: tackling undersupply is beneficial electorally in those must-hold gains across the North and Midlands made in 2019, but MPs in longer-held seats, many of which are in the South, oppose the push from central government needed to deliver that.
The big issue with this is that without this pressure, it is hard to see how the required number of homes will ever get built, meaning home ownership – which many still see as critical to voting Tory – will fall further.
The Home Builders Federation has warned about the economic consequences, too, claiming the Government’s row-back on building targets could cut supply to a low of 156,000 homes a year, costing up to 386,000 jobs and foregoing as much as £34bn in GVA.
What can the party do about this before the election? The obvious issue to tackle is planning, but serious reform is off the table. Therefore, other options need to be explored.
The first is simply to stop making the situation worse; builders often complain of a recent raft of tax and regulatory burdens, which could at very least be mitigated.
On the tax side, for example, there is what has been dubbed the cladding tax regime, whereby British builders are paying billions to remediate historic cladding which complied with regulations of the time, but is now deemed unsafe.
This is the right thing to do, and builders agreed to it. But the system is forcing British builders to pay for cladding installed by firms headquartered overseas, who are not contributing. They are thus paying the whole bill, an extra burden the Home Builders Federation say will mean 70,000 fewer affordable homes being built over the next decade.
Overseas builders must pay in, and the tax reduced as the burden is spread more fairly..
A related regulatory example would be new fire safety rules. A consultation is under way on whether to require second staircases on new buildings over a certain height. Sadiq Khan, however, has sought to get ahead of regulation for political gain and simply ruled that no new buildings can be signed off without this second staircase.
Yet the actual regulation has not yet been thought through and clarified; uncertainty over how it will work has, according to analysts Lambert Smith Hampton and Connells, halted around 125,000 homes being released across London.
There are several other examples, but the point is that the rafts of new tax and regulation imposed by government should be reviewed, and ideally mitigated in favour of speeding housing supply.
There are also other good ideas for new policy. The Centre for Policy Studies has proposed expanding access to long-term mortgages by reforming deposit ratios, which means carefully reintroducing higher value mortgages which require smaller deposits. This is very highly popular: the new polling conducted for this article series suggests 77 per cent of people want more policy action to make home ownership a reality for young people.
At the other end of the housing ladder, ministers should consider cutting stamp duty for downsizers, an idea that helps older people in larger properties move to more appropriate housing, including with care facilities, releasing their homes for families.
Older people are very often cashflow poor so face major disincentives to move due to the tax bill. Reforming this would spur increased stamp duty transactions through the chain and offset the loss of stamp duty on the elderly people’s homes in question.
The crucial policy, however, endorsed by four former housing ministers, is simply to pull out all the stops to boost homebuilding on the supply-side. Much more use can be made of brownfield sites, for example, to expand building for young people or key workers who tend more often to live in city areas.
There are many good ideas out there, but we appear to be going in the wrong direction. A final polling finding that should ring alarm bells for Conservatives is that, when asked which party is best placed on housing policy, only 24 per cent chose the Conservatives, while 46 per cent placed confidence in Labour.
Labour’s own polling must reveal something similar, as Starmer is now touting it as the ‘party of ownership’, making a direct move onto aspirational (and traditionally Tory) territory.
If Conservatives fail to make a serious offer to boost homebuilding, they risk the public being drawn to Labour to meet their aspirations. Yet that means flirting with some highly dubious ideas: Labour’s mayors of London, Manchester, and Liverpool, for example, have signed a joint letter calling for rent controls, which would be disastrous.
Ultimately, Conservative strategists have to bite the bullet. For voters in key target seats at the next election, building lots more homes is well-supported – and that is what the party should do.
Alex Black is a former Conservative aide.
A big debate is being waged within the Conservative Party on what to do about England’s lack of housebuilding.
Many MPs appear to simply want to hide the issue until after the election, fearing the sheer scale of building required will spark furious constituency objections. Others see declining rates of building as an existential threat for the party, due to a traditional link between home ownership and voting blue.
But what are the actual electorate saying, including in marginal seats? This article uses new polling to shed light on how the party might manage the issue towards the election.
Lack of housing supply is not a new problem. A recent Centre for Cities estimate showed that since around 1950, Britain has built up a structural deficit of around 4.3 million new homes compared to average European building rates.
Today’s problems, including ever-rising pressures on affordability, result from a long-term structural undersupply of new housing stock – and new polling, commissioned from Deltapoll for this article, shows that voters certainly recognise this.
First, housing is seen as a major issue: when asked “what do you think are the most important problems facing the country”, housing ranks higher than education or taxation, and equal to crime. Second, a majority (57 per cent) support “significantly increasing the number of new houses built each year”, compared with just 25 per cent who disagree; a ‘net support’ figure of +32 per cent.
What is interesting is how these numbers break down by constituency. Net support rises dramatically to +48 per cent in the key battleground seats for the party at the next election: the 2019 gains which include the so-called Red Wall, where 67 per cent supported building significantly more, while only 19 per cent opposed it.
Support is lowest, at just 49 per cent, among seats the Conservatives already held before 2019, and many of these MPs were among the rebels who recently forced the Government to halt planning reform and stop pressuring local areas to deliver new development in the volumes needed.
The picture here is clear: tackling undersupply is beneficial electorally in those must-hold gains across the North and Midlands made in 2019, but MPs in longer-held seats, many of which are in the South, oppose the push from central government needed to deliver that.
The big issue with this is that without this pressure, it is hard to see how the required number of homes will ever get built, meaning home ownership – which many still see as critical to voting Tory – will fall further.
The Home Builders Federation has warned about the economic consequences, too, claiming the Government’s row-back on building targets could cut supply to a low of 156,000 homes a year, costing up to 386,000 jobs and foregoing as much as £34bn in GVA.
What can the party do about this before the election? The obvious issue to tackle is planning, but serious reform is off the table. Therefore, other options need to be explored.
The first is simply to stop making the situation worse; builders often complain of a recent raft of tax and regulatory burdens, which could at very least be mitigated.
On the tax side, for example, there is what has been dubbed the cladding tax regime, whereby British builders are paying billions to remediate historic cladding which complied with regulations of the time, but is now deemed unsafe.
This is the right thing to do, and builders agreed to it. But the system is forcing British builders to pay for cladding installed by firms headquartered overseas, who are not contributing. They are thus paying the whole bill, an extra burden the Home Builders Federation say will mean 70,000 fewer affordable homes being built over the next decade.
Overseas builders must pay in, and the tax reduced as the burden is spread more fairly..
A related regulatory example would be new fire safety rules. A consultation is under way on whether to require second staircases on new buildings over a certain height. Sadiq Khan, however, has sought to get ahead of regulation for political gain and simply ruled that no new buildings can be signed off without this second staircase.
Yet the actual regulation has not yet been thought through and clarified; uncertainty over how it will work has, according to analysts Lambert Smith Hampton and Connells, halted around 125,000 homes being released across London.
There are several other examples, but the point is that the rafts of new tax and regulation imposed by government should be reviewed, and ideally mitigated in favour of speeding housing supply.
There are also other good ideas for new policy. The Centre for Policy Studies has proposed expanding access to long-term mortgages by reforming deposit ratios, which means carefully reintroducing higher value mortgages which require smaller deposits. This is very highly popular: the new polling conducted for this article series suggests 77 per cent of people want more policy action to make home ownership a reality for young people.
At the other end of the housing ladder, ministers should consider cutting stamp duty for downsizers, an idea that helps older people in larger properties move to more appropriate housing, including with care facilities, releasing their homes for families.
Older people are very often cashflow poor so face major disincentives to move due to the tax bill. Reforming this would spur increased stamp duty transactions through the chain and offset the loss of stamp duty on the elderly people’s homes in question.
The crucial policy, however, endorsed by four former housing ministers, is simply to pull out all the stops to boost homebuilding on the supply-side. Much more use can be made of brownfield sites, for example, to expand building for young people or key workers who tend more often to live in city areas.
There are many good ideas out there, but we appear to be going in the wrong direction. A final polling finding that should ring alarm bells for Conservatives is that, when asked which party is best placed on housing policy, only 24 per cent chose the Conservatives, while 46 per cent placed confidence in Labour.
Labour’s own polling must reveal something similar, as Starmer is now touting it as the ‘party of ownership’, making a direct move onto aspirational (and traditionally Tory) territory.
If Conservatives fail to make a serious offer to boost homebuilding, they risk the public being drawn to Labour to meet their aspirations. Yet that means flirting with some highly dubious ideas: Labour’s mayors of London, Manchester, and Liverpool, for example, have signed a joint letter calling for rent controls, which would be disastrous.
Ultimately, Conservative strategists have to bite the bullet. For voters in key target seats at the next election, building lots more homes is well-supported – and that is what the party should do.