Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss who have made it through to the final two in the Tory leadership race (PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)Record high rents and a severe shortage of rental homes. House prices detached from the economic reality of all but the wealthy. A cladding crisis that drags on. Decade-long waiting lists for council housing.
Millions in the UK are struggling with one or more of these issues.
So we can assume housing is a priority for the Tory leadership hopefuls, right? Well, you know what they say about assuming.
While this week’s heatwave helped force the issue around climate change in the leadership debates, the UK’s housing crisis has been trundling along more or less uninterrupted for more than a decade.
Until Michael Gove’s short-lived tenure as housing secretary, almost nothing had been done for private renters, while policies for first-time buyers arguably inflated house prices and handed fat profits (and an incentive to build) to developers rather than making housing more affordable for first-time buyers.
The trouble is, the people worst affected by the housing crisis tend to be younger than the typical Tory voter, while the most exorbitant homes are all in London, hardly the Conservative Party’s heartland.
It’s not exactly surprising then that in amongst the talk about taxes and trans rights, little has been said about building more homes (guaranteed to spook Nimby voters and Green Belt dwellers) or cementing Mr Gove’s proposed rental reforms.
And yet, Help to Buy is set to end five months early; thousands are still trapped in unsafe, unsellable homes; and renters are increasingly at the mercy of unscrupulous agents as rental market competition reaches fever pitch.
The UN says housing is a basic human right, it’s time politics treated it with the urgency it deserves.
