The party seems to be moving away from its recent commitment to a ‘property-owning democracy’. But it is enough to solve Britain’s housing crisis?
What it means: Pretty much everyone thinks that Britain doesn’t have enough houses and that the houses we do have are too expensive to both buy and rent. Luckily, the government has come up with a solution: spend £2 billion on new social housing. (Social housing, FYI, is homes that are rented cheaply to the people who need it most. You might call them council houses).
This sounds like a lovely idea. But (there’s always a but) not everyone is convinced it’s actually going to do much to fix the problem. The opposing Labour party says £2 billion is nowhere near enough money and the government should copy Labour’s plan to build a million affordable homes (there were 1.2 million families on the waiting list for social housing in 2017).
The government’s plan also doesn’t do much for people who don’t qualify for social housing but are still spending most of their income on rent and/or struggling to get on the housing ladder because house prices are so high. Lots of studies say that house prices won’t come down until we build 300,000 new houses a year (the government managed 200,000 in 2016-2017). That’s because of something called supply and demand, which means when more people want to rent or buy a home than there are homes available, they’ll end up bidding up the price as they compete to get a home.
