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June 18, 2024
9 minute read
Let’s start with the two main political parties vying for your votes and a summary of Conservative and Labour housing manifestos. Read on for more details and for the manifestos of the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Reform UK.
| Conservatives | Labour | |
|---|---|---|
| House-building | Deliver 1.6 million well-designed homes ‘in the right places while protecting our countryside, permanently’ | Restore mandatory house-building targets immediately. Pledge to build 1.5 million new homes during term. |
| Planning reform | Provide a fast-track planning route for new homes on previously developed land in the 20 largest cities. Councils to be required to set land aside for local and smaller builders. | Take tough action to ensure planning authorities have up-to-date Local Plans and strengthen the presumption in favour of sustainable development. Fund additional planning officers. |
| Green belt | Retain a ‘cast-iron commitment’ to protect the Green Belt from uncontrolled development. | Will take a brownfield-first approach. Committed to the green belt and will take a strategic approach. |
| First time buyers | Make the temporary first time buyer Stamp Duty relief on homes up to £425,000 permanent. Introduce a new Help to Buy scheme. Will continue with the mortgage guarantee scheme. | Launch of a permanent mortgage guarantee scheme. First time buyers will get chance to buy homes before international investors. |
| Renters | Will pass Renters Reform Bill and fully abolish Section 21 and strengthen other grounds for landlords to evict private tenants guilty of anti-social behaviour. | Will overhaul the regulation of private rented sector and immediately abolish Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions, empower them to challenge unreasonable rent increases, and raise standards. |
| Energy efficiency | Invest £6 bn over the next 3 years to make around 1 million homes warmer. Funding of an energy efficiency voucher scheme, open to every household in England. | Plan to double investment (an extra £6.6 bn) to upgrade 5 million homes. The Warm Homes Plan will offer grants and low interest loans for insulation, solar panels, batteries and low carbon heating to cut bills. |
| Building safety | Continue support for leaseholders affected by historic building safety problems. | Will take “decisive action” to improve building safety through new regulation. |
| Leaseholders | Will complete the process of leasehold reform, will cap ground rents at £250, reducing them to peppercorn over time. Will end the misuse of forfeiture and make it easier to take up commonhold. | Will enact Law Commission proposals on leasehold enfranchisement, right to manage and commonhold. Will ban new leasehold flats and ensure commonhold is the default tenure. Promises to review how to better protect leaseholders, including tackling unregulated and “unaffordable” ground rent charges. |
| Fleecehold | – | Will bring the injustice of ‘fleecehold’ private housing estates and unfair maintenance costs to an end. |
| Stamp duty | Will not increase stamp duty. Make the temporary first time buyer Stamp Duty relief on homes up to £425,000 permanent. | Will increase the rate of the stamp duty surcharge paid by non-UK residents |
| New towns | Raise density levels in inner London by ensuring the London Plan delivers more homes on brownfield sites. | Will build a ‘new generation of new towns’ |
| Social and affordable housing | Renew the Affordable Homes Programme that will deliver homes of all tenures. Will legislate for new ‘Local Connection’ and ‘UK Connection’ tests for social housing in England. | Will deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation. |
| Right to Buy | Will ensure Right to Buy discounts rise with inflation and fight any plan by local authorities to abolish the Right to Buy altogether | Will review the increased Right to Buy discounts introduced in 2012 |
| Capital Gains Tax | Will introduce a two-year temporary Capital Gains Tax relief for landlords who sell to their existing tenants. | Will not introduce capital gains tax on private homes, but will close the loophole “where private equity is the only industry where performance related pay is treated as capital gains.” |
| Council tax | Will not increase the number of council tax bands, re-evaluate or cut council tax discounts | – |
| Holiday Lets | Will ensure councils can manage the ‘uncontrolled growth of holiday lets’ | – |
| Homelessness | Will continue with plans to end rough sleeping and prevent people from ending up on the streets in the first place | Will develop a new cross-government strategy, working with Mayors and Councils across the country, to put Britain back on track to ending homelessness. |
While neither the Conservatives or Labour explain in the manifestos exactly how they’re going to solve all the problems that have stopped Britain hitting new homes targets for 30 years, the Labour Party will be reintroducing mandatory housing targets.
Building targets are key to encourage local decision makers to drive through housing plans in the face of NIMBYISM. Addressing this Labour says, ‘We will ensure local communities continue to shape housebuilding in their area, but where necessary Labour will not be afraid to make full use of intervention powers to build the houses we need.”
We are holding out hope that the winning party will create a National Housebuilding Strategy so we have the vision, detail, milestones and targets for achieving these targets set out. This is one of the key things we’ve called for ahead of the General Election. Read more in General Election: 5 asks to help home ownership.
In their manifesto Labour explains how they will “strengthen planning obligations” to ensure new developments provide more affordable homes, make changes to the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) to “ensure that it delivers more homes from existing funding”, and support councils and housing associations to build their capacity and “make a greater contribution to affordable housing supply”.
They promise to build new social rented homes and better protect existing stock by reviewing Right to Buy discounts and increase protections on newly built social housing.
The Conservative party doesn’t mention plans for building more social housing, only how they will allocate existing social housing.
A quick win for all parties would be to appoint a statutory new homes ombudsman to protect new homebuyers including shared owners and those buying retirement properties.
Leasehold reforms finally made it into law this year under the current Conservative government after they acknowledged the leasehold system was outdated and unfair. While these reforms help improve the current system they fall short of abolishing leasehold on all new flats. So we welcome the Labour party’s commitment to ban new leasehold flats and for commonhold to be the default tenure.
While the Conservative party doesn’t commit to abolishing leasehold is does, along with the Labour party, promise to tackle the issue of unfair ground rent for existing leaseholders.
We are also pleased to see Labour tackling Fleecehold (whereby you buy a house with a combination of freehold and leasehold terms. It usually means you own the land, but you have to pay onerous annual or monthly fees to a third party to maintain it and is arguably the next big housing scandal). You can see the strength of feeling from the almost 1000 comments we have received on our estate charges guide. The first step in remedying this situation will be to make it mandatory for all future new build estates to be adopted by local authorities and to ban all future estate rent charges.
We welcome the Conservative party’s plan to continue the mortgage guarantee scheme. In reality though the scheme was to stimulate lenders to offer 95% mortgages, and most lenders now offer these anyhow, so take up of the scheme is low. It’s also not something you as a first time buyer will necessarily be aware of as you don’t apply for the scheme, it’s something lenders can decide to use or not.
Their proposal for a new Help to Buy scheme will no doubt prove popular with first time buyers, though again the devil will be in the detail. We also wonder, if it’s such a great idea, why did they bother recently scrapping the existing Help to Buy scheme?
In similar vein we welcome Labour’s plans to launch a permanent mortgage guarantee scheme, though it’s not clear how it will differ and what the real impact will be.
Labour also pledges to ‘work with local authorities to give first-time buyers the first chance to buy homes’ so they’re not sold off to international investors before they’re even built. We support this move but wonder how it will be implemented so as not to undermine the house building target.
We welcome the Conservatives’ commitment to making the temporary first time buyer Stamp Duty relief on homes up to £425,000 permanent. But we are disappointed they didn’t also take the opportunity to raise the thresholds in line with house prices. Given the average house price in London is £492k, it’s unlikely many first-time buyers in London will benefit from this relief.
Reform UK have also committed to reform the thresholds (see below).
In our view, all parties have missed a trick by not scrapping Stamp Duty altogether for those buying a house to live in. It’s a tax that puts off families from moving up the property ladder, fleeces homeowners needing to make a sideways move and makes it more expensive for older generations to downsize. We’ve long campaigned to scrap stamp duty for people buying homes to live in.
We do however continue to support the 3% surcharge on buy-to-let and second homes, and the 2% surcharge for non UK residents – and we support Labour’s plan to increase this.
It’s such a shame that none of the manifestos even acknowledge our broken system of buying and selling homes. For the past 7 years, the government has investigated and consulted on reforms such as the Regulation of Property Agents and the role that reservation agreements could play. We see transaction times taking longer, more sales collapsing and homebuyers and sellers paying huge costs without even having bought somewhere to live. We will continue to lobby for change.
Click here to read the full Labour Party manifesto and Conservative manifesto
The Lib Dems’ manifesto has a target of 380,000 new homes a year, including 150,000 social homes, delivered via ten ‘new garden cities’ and community-led development in existing cities and towns.
Pledges in their manifesto also include:
You can read the Lib Dems manifesto here
The Green Party say their ‘Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price Charter’ will simultaneously protect green space for communities, reduce climate emissions, tackle fuel poverty and provide genuinely affordable housing. As with all the political parties there is little detail on how this will be achieved.
They also:
You can read the Green Party manifesto here
Reform UK says it will “ensure that people can own their own home by unleashing housebuilding across the country and cutting immigration”.
As with all the political parties there is little detail on how this will be achieved. While there is an absence of any housebuilding targets, Reform say they will start with a review of the planning system to fast-track planning and tax incentives for development of brownfield sites and with a ‘loose fit planning’ policy for large residential developments.
They also say they will reform social housing law and prioritise local people and those who have paid into
the system saying “Foreign nationals must go to the back of the queue. Not the front”.
We support their proposed cut to residential stamp duty which will see stamp duty applied as follows:
Despite their name, the Reform party don’t propose reforming leasehold. Instead it sounds like they will implement the current Leasehold Reform Act: they propose offering further “protection for leaseholders” by requiring all potential charges for leasehold or freehold residents “to be clearly stated and consented to” and ensuring it is cheaper and easier to extend leases to 990 years and buy freeholds.
You can read the Reform manifesto here
Let us know in the comments below.
October 30, 2024 
