This week is the war of the manifestos. Labour has laid out its vision for Britain under Jeremy Corbyn while Theresa May has unveiled her first real policy pronouncements since her sudden coronation last summer.
Housing features prominently in both, with clear differences in promises, scope and detail, showing the ideological contrasts between May’s Conservatives and Labour under Corbyn.
When Labour MPs were battling to replace Ed Miliband as party leader, Corbyn laid out comprehensive plans for solving the housing crisis. Focusing not just on first-time buyers but the homeless and households struggling to pay rent, these ideas have been expanded in Labour’s manifesto. Labour promises to end rough sleeping within the next parliament, building 4,000 homes ring-fenced for people with a history of rough sleeping, and safeguarding homeless hostels and services. In addition, Labour notes that getting people off the streets is pointless without recognising and working to end the causes of homelessness: poor mental health, a lack of social security, low pay and insecure tenancies for the poorest and most vulnerable.
On homelessness, the Tories promise to halve rough sleeping in the next parliament, a commitment that essentially does nothing more than undo the harm already caused. Doing so would still leave more people on the streets than there were before they came into power. Under the Conservatives, rough sleeping has more than doubled. Scant on detail, May says the Tories will follow the Housing First model that has worked so well in Scandinavia, and implement the Homelessness Reduction Act. To do so, local authorities will need plenty of funding, both to build homes for those in need, and to keep services for rough sleepers open.
In the past five years, cuts to council funding have bitten hard, and housing and homelessness services are threatened across the country. With no funding commitments and a track record of boosting rather than ending rough sleeping, a near-certain Conservative victory is bad news for Britain’s homelessness crisis.
Labour attacks the Conservatives’ record on council housing. At a time when private rents are rising faster than wages, right to buy and the looming forced sale of council housing has deepened the housing crisis. Focusing on first-time buyers ignores the fact that, for many people, buying is out of the question and even clinging to private rented accommodation is difficult.
Corbyn promises to end the bedroom tax and suspend right to buy unless councils can prove homes sold will be rebuilt on a one-for-one basis. Labour will also abolish the Tory policy denying housing benefit to 18- to 21-year-olds. Labour also promises to build a million homes in the next parliament if elected, with 100,000 council and housing association homes at a genuinely affordable rent set at local wage levels. This is a lower number than initially floated, but far higher than Conservative promises.
From May, instead we have a promise of right to buy on steroids: a number of council homes built (with no spending commitments) that will be sold five years later. The Conservatives have already ended tenancies for life for council tenants, and now for the small number of people who will benefit from one of the new council homes, if they can’t afford to buy their rented home at the end of the five-year period it will be sold off into the private sector.
It’s difficult to see this as anything other than a bung for private landlords, offering them more stock paid for by the government, at a time when some councils are being forced to pay way over the odds to rent back properties sold under right to buy.
May’s manifesto shows her complacency: for all the quiet mumblings about housing, there is no desire from the Conservatives to properly end the housing crisis. Too many of the Conservatives’ friends and fellow travellers benefit from high house prices and rents, and underlying everything is the staunch belief that if you can’t afford to rent your home it is not because the market is rigged, but because of a personal failing that does not deserve to go unpunished. A Conservative victory looks like a near certainty: and so too, it follows, does the lingering of the housing crisis.
Sign up for your free Guardian Housing network newsletter with comment and sector views sent direct to you on the last Friday of the month. Follow us:@GuardianHousing
