General elections and the politics of housing supply

We were in Leeds for a social event recently, and before going, I took a moment to look at the city from a housing perspective. Despite growing up just a few miles north of the city and apart from a night spent sleeping in a bus station after a night’s clubbing as a fresh-faced 18-year-old, I don’t know the city that well.

Fast forward to 2023, I’m less concerned about how comfortable the bus station benches are and more concerned about housing delivery. Leeds City Council had 24,000 families on its housing list (the waiting list for a social housing allocation) in 2021, and that same year 595 social houses were built. The figures weren’t available when I searched, so we don’t know yet how much the housing list increased in that year, but I’m betting it was more than 595 families. It’s also worth noting, 2021 is the height of the post-COVID boom, not 2022 or 2023, where people are feeling the pinch from the cost-of-living crisis and Liz Truss’s exciting games with the economy.

It all paints a bleak picture indeed.

A familiar story

Leeds is far from unique. Affordable homes delivery is far lower than it needs to be nationwide, but especially outside the south-east of England where viability assessments have consistently allowed affordable delivery to be reduced. Fundamentally, we’re not building enough homes, and therefore the delivery of affordable stock is miles away from where it needs to be.

The housing “target”

There is the much-publicised target of 300,000 homes per year, which the government has used for several years, but the figure that’s actually required varies depending on who you ask and where they get their statistics from. One study, commissioned by the National Housing Federation and Crisis, the homelessness charity, puts the figure at 340,000, with 145,000 of them being in one of the many affordable tenures. How are we doing? In 2021/2, we built around 233,000 homes. That’s one heck of a shortfall, and in fact, we haven’t managed to build more than 300,000 homes in any given year since the 1960s, and it’s been below 250,000 per year since 2001.

You’ll note that “since 2001” means that both main political parties have had the chance to have a decent crack at the problem and being in coalition for 5 years means even the Liberal Democrats could have weighed in on it. So, if there’s to be an election in 2024, what’s the best bet to get the number up?

What do we know so far about how the political parties will approach the issue?

Reds vs blues?

Let’s talk about the Conservative Party first, given that they’ve had 13 years in government. During the local election campaign in 2022, the party changed the way local authorities had to deliver housing numbers through their Local Plans and effectively removed housing targets. That doesn’t seem to be very proactive, on the face of it. Could they have been trying to deregulate to promote growth, or was it just a quick sticking plaster policy to shore up their results in Tory heartlands during the election? With the updated NPPF being released any day now, it seems likely the Tories will double down on their position of trying to cement their NIMBY base.

Kier Starmer has made lots of interesting noises about housing policy, confirming they will keep the affordab300,000 homes a year target, and making interesting noises about how they will take a fresh and nuanced approach to the green belt and its affect on development. However, presently there’s nothing concrete proposed, and very little in the way of detail about how they will act differently to make the target achievable.

Is “build to rent” a viable housing strategy?

What are some of the ideas that could be brought into play to get us building at the rate we need? What can we do specifically to boost affordable housing delivery? What should our housing market actually look like?

An interesting area - and one which has been booming in the cost-of-living crisis over the last 12 months - is developments in different tenures, like Build to Rent (BtR). This has been boosted by private developers taking a long hard look at mortgage availability and rates, and simply selling their open market stock into BtR investment vehicles. As the sector becomes more established, however, we could see innovation around the format of the properties being built – do private renters want the same type of housing as private market buyers? How does maintenance affect the nature of the stock? Does the market in BtR drive energy efficiency more to keep monthly costs for tenants down, or does it hold it back because the landlords don’t want complex maintenance arrangements?

Council Housing a natural fit for Labour’s election manifesto?

Something that would naturally fit in a traditional Labour manifesto is council housing. How could Starmer ensure that councils (many of whom are in effective bankruptcy at present) are empowered to develop their own housing stock? Would it make sense to remove the right to buy to protect that stock? How would established registered providers and Housing Associations fit into this? Could we renationalise social housing stock? Local councils often have a good landholding, so could be funded to begin developing it out, but how effective is a local authority at optimising land? What happens when the landholding is used up, can Councils compete on the open market, or is there a new strand to the Compulsory Purchase procedures to allow them to seize stalled brownfield sites for social housing?

There’s many unanswered questions here.

Retrofitting density

What about retrofit? Currently the nature of VAT legislation means that it’s often cheaper to demolish and rebuild than to retrofit housing stock. This doesn’t, on the face of it, seem logical, but perhaps demolition and increasing density allows us to get closer to the target without releasing as much green belt land. What about a solution to retrofit density into housing stock? At university, I produced a small (rather silly) project to develop a kit built, 3m wide, “parasitic” house that would cling to the sides of existing houses and provide an additional dwelling above their existing driveway. Perhaps something like that could be a great way for homeowners to generate a rental income from a small additional dwelling on their own land, or allow kids to move out of the main house into the secondary unit.

Putting housing top of the agenda

Housing is likely to be – in fact it must be – a headline topic at 2024’s general election. It’s the electrified third rail for lots of Conservative safe seats, and Sunak will struggle to bring forward a meaningful policy without risking the ire of suburban tory voters. Starmer could be radical and put forward some new ideas to begin to change the landscape, and many assume he’s the default option for Prime Minister. Does he have enough confidence in his poll lead to allow him to take the sort of major steps forward we – and 24,000 families in Leeds – so desperately need?