Figures show that house sales held steady in October (PA)
(Picture: PA Archive)Society, wrote Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France, “is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” This was one of the founding principles of modern Conservatism — but I am beginning to wonder if, like so much else in what was once the Tory ethical code, it has been forgotten or ditched.
Last week’s Autumn Statement was conspicuously skewed in favour of older voters: specifically in its retention of the pension triple-lock, its promise of a £300 pensioner cost of living payment in 2023-24, and Jeremy Hunt’s decision not to move forward with suggested changes to the pensions lifetime allowance and pensions tax relief.
Nothing intrinsically wrong with any of that, of course. What is troubling is the extent to which the governing party seems now to have more or less turned its back on the young, and is certainly making no noticeable effort to encourage members of Generation Z to believe they have much to look forward to.
An especially egregious case study: tomorrow, the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill reaches its report stage in the Commons — and is weighed down with amendments that, if enacted, would make it even harder for the Conservatives to achieve their manifesto pledge to build 300,000 homes a year.
Led by former environment secretary Theresa Villiers, a group of Tory MPs — including John Redwood, Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling and Damian Green — is pressing for a serious weakening of housing targets set by Whitehall and of measures to enforce the presumption in favour of sustainable development where insufficient homes have been built.
One of Boris Johnson’s best objectives was to empower a new “Generation Buy”: to liberate the young from confinement in the private rental sector and improve their prospects of getting on the property ladder. Right now, those prospects are dismal.
According to the Land Registry, property prices rose by 9.5 per cent year-on-year in September. As the nation’s primary economic objective continues to be taming inflation, mortgage rates will remain high for the foreseeable future. There is an urgent need for more affordable housing — not only for the young, of course, but for their generational cohort in particular.
But this is not, apparently, a priority for Villiers, MP for Chipping Barnet since 2005. Her principal concern is that the drive to build these desperately needed houses should not “urbanise the suburbs”: as pithy an expression of the NIMBY creed as I have come across. One might feel a batsqueak of sympathy were it not for the fact that it presently takes an average of five years for a residential property development to get through the planning system. Villiers and her colleagues evidently believe this is much too fast. The young, so often grotesquely caricatured as “snowflakes”, have put up with a great deal in recent years. In the pandemic, they made considerable sacrifices to minimise the spread of a virus that disproportionately affected the elderly — with often serious consequences for their own mental health (“working from home” is a tough assignment if you live in a flatshare and your desk is in the same room as your bed).
They pay increasing amounts for higher education — a public good many of their parents enjoyed for free. They loathe Brexit, which they (correctly) regard as an unwanted bequest from the old to the young. They watch in despair as another COP summit ends in disappointment and platitudes. Those leaving full-time education enter a job market in which unemployment is rising once more, entry-level jobs are often pitifully remunerated and salaries lag far behind inflation.
The political mystery at the heart of this is the apparent indifference of the Conservative Party to those whom it should be wooing as its future core vote. Part of the Tory genius used to be an emphasis upon aspiration, opportunity and meritocratic advancement.
The binding notion of the “property-owning democracy” — symbolised by the sale of council houses in the Eighties — was the great electoral lure to the young as they reached their thirties. Today, the party seems to have given up on this age group, as if its existing electoral base will live forever. Tomorrow, Tory MPs have a chance to show they have not yet succumbed to such political idiocy and intellectual atrophy, by rejecting the ghastly Villiers amendments. Will they?
