Tories failure on housing

[ThinkAboutItTomorrow]

There's lots of talk on these boards and beyond about the lack of difference between labour & Tories. People say that with no money to spend and fenced in on tax there's not much labour can do to improve things.

This article in the guardian highlights how wrong this is. The Tories have blown £29bn on help to buy which has been an abject failure.

You have to believe Labour would make much better choices on where to invest £29bn to improve the housing situation (clue, increase housing supply).

Anyway help to buy failed but Sunak wants to bring it back, so they don't even learn from their mistakes 🤯:

1. It increased house prices (8% in London) making it less affordable than ever for first time buyers
2. It mostly helped richer first time buyers (average income of those in the scheme was £50k and 3/5 of them didn't need the scheme to buy but used it to get a bigger place)
3. It increased developers revenue and profits by 57%
4. It drove development of green field sites not central areas where it was needed.
5. It's trapped many in negative equity so they can't move.

How a disastrous Tory policy blew up the housing market https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2024/jun/21/help-to-buy-how-a-disastrous-tory-policy-blew-up-the-housing-market?CMP=sharebtnn_url

Thank you for this. I'm a renter, and the housing crisis causes me to despair at times.
I am a former Labour voter. I can't this time, as they've moved too far to the right for my taste. Voting Green. I think Corbyn's Labour, and the Green Party now, would do far more for vulnerable-housed people. But, nonetheless, I do agree that Starmer's Labour will still be an improvement on the Tories on this issue.

The next government should follow Scotland and Wales and withdraw the Right to Buy in England.

@ThinkAboutItTomorrow I haven’t noticed that at all. I think posters see a big difference. What they all have a probltm with is being untruthful about spending and taxation. I’d rather believe the IFS and not randoms on here.

The housing shortage is because no one wants new houses near them. We get hs2 but no houses. Who is going to build them? Where’s the money coming from and the expertise? That’s all with housing developers. It’s possible relaxing planning requirements might free up land but cleaning up contaminated land is very very expensive. Who is paying? Are you paying vis rents?

Private landlords stepped into the breach, council house tenants bought the houses you would like to live in.

Corbyn was not electable. That’s dead in the water. The country won’t be impressed by tax hikes and if we don’t watch it, there won’t be any growth under Labour either. Growth to provide houses. In fact growth to provide everything. Always think through about what policies cost and what will really work. Just telling others to pay up rarely does.

I think the point this that there was lots of government money for housing. Just spent on new build home ownership (which inflated prices) rather than social housing or something else

Another Tory failure on housing- abolishing the tenant services authority.

@ThreeFeetTall What money has any government spent on housing? Apart from housing benefit. The government doesn’t build houses. Housing Associations or private developers do this. Housing associations borrow money to build and get a return via rents. The government delivers a housing policy. Labour had no effective policies for getting more houses and continued to allow right to buy.

£29 billion in subsidy for help to buy. The government aren't building houses directly, apart from some councils have very small house building programmes.

Housing benefit is a pretty massive bill too which could be reduced by building more social housing

What happens if the housing isn’t near where people need to be? It really isn’t that easy. IFS says £22 billion spent on help to buy but they were loans . It got people out of the rental market. Without that, they would still be renting. So what would that have done to the rental sector?

But 3 out of 5 help to buy scheme participants would have bought anyway and just used the chance to buy somewhere bigger so there was little impact on the rental sector

@ThinkAboutItTomorrow And huge numbers of Sure Start dc didn’t need that investment either! It’s difficult to prove people don’t need something. In the SE they did need help. Housing costs do much more. Should the scheme have ignored all the cheaper areas then? How would that go down?

Not sure I understand what you're getting at?

I was replying to your inference that renting would have been even harder without the scheme due to more people in the market. That's why I pointed out that 60% of participants wouldn't have stayed renting anyway. That number is taken from the governments own assessment, based on a survey to participants.

Help to buy has helped mostly higher income (average of £50k per household) people get on the housing ladder.

Sure start only helped people on other benefits so was relatively well targeted at those in most need.

It was about 3/5 would have bought anyway. They might but possibly not where they preferred and maybe a better location meant less travel. All policies get used by people who don’t always need them but for people with no bank of mum and dad, it was a help. Numbers dropped off though which might be because property became too expensive. Help to buy would be great in run down Cornwall if you were a teacher or doctor. Not quite so good in London.

Surely if they stayed renting, the rental sector would be even hotter? Is that desirable? I think for those who needed a leg up it was effectively a bridging loan. We don’t have enough social housing and most of the help to buy would not have got it. Also, we might have targeted it. People have been able to get social housing decades ago through doing social jobs, eg teaching, social work etc. They then stay put denying others the change of social accommodation. I think moving them on to help to buy would help younger folk who cannot get anything and have to pay high commercial rents which prevents them from saving.