Housing is set to be one of the biggest issues of the election, with recent polling showing that it was the fourth most important to Britons, behind only Health, the Economy, and Immigration.
Reforming the planning system to build 1.5 million homes in the next parliament has become one of Keir Starmer’s crucial missions ahead of the next election, while the Conservatives are planning bold housebuilding projects in London and Cambridge.
The Housing Forum, the UK’s cross-sector, industry-wide organisation that represents the entire housing supply chain, has called for political parties to adopt a £4bn ‘Housing Accelerator Fund’ in a Manifesto for Housing launched in advance of the 2024 general election.
The Manifesto calls on all political parties to adopt housing as a top 5 priority, and to commit to a long-term plan for housing for as long as 25 years. The proposals include ways to improve housing supply, quality, and affordable housing, including:
- Reintroducing housing targets alongside introduce strong incentives for local authorities to meet them, including requiring a five-year land supply and increasing funding for infrastructure for areas meeting or exceeding their targets.
- Moving community input into planning upstream to the plan-making stage, including the use of design codes.
- Reforming and updating the social rent formula, with rents reflecting the energy efficiency of the property.
- Removing VAT from all forms of retrofitting, regeneration and fire safety work.
- Reforming grant rates for affordable housing to a rate per habitable room to encourage the building of larger homes for families.
Chief among these calls is for a £4bn ‘Housing Accelerator Fund’, to build an extra 60,000 affordable homes. Doing so, The Housing Forum claims, would cut homelessness in half in three years.
The Housing Forum is also calling on politicians to avoid “damaging and inflammatory rhetoric such as ‘concreting over the countryside’ to describe building the homes and neighbourhoods needed for people to thrive”.
The Manifesto is the latest intervention by The Housing Forum into the public discussion ahead of the next election after recent reports on streamlining the planning process and planning validation requirements, and on the nutrient neutrality debate.
Launching the Manifesto, Shelagh Grant, Chief Executive of the Housing Forum, said: "A lack of affordable quality housing is the main problem holding back Britain. It limits people’s prosperity, keeps them in poor health, and stops them from reaching the opportunities they need to thrive. Our Manifesto is a roadmap not just to solving the housing crisis at hand, but for setting the housing sector on a positive trajectory for generations to come."
Stephen Teagle, Chair of The Housing Forum said: "It is positive to see the main political parties taking housing seriously, but a long-term plan is needed to deliver the scale of new housing – and in particular affordable housing that is needed. We need commitment from all political parties to putting housing at the heart of government."
