A plague on all their houses

This year’s political party conference season was dominated by Labour’s disappointment at losing the support of The Sun newspaper. So should Social Housing magazine seek to advise our readers which political party to vote for, based on their affordable housing strategies?

Don’t worry - you won’t be seeing those banner headlines any time soon. Housing has still not crept up the agenda sufficiently to rival education or health, and there’s a clear lack of good candidates offering detailed housing policy proposals.

Traditionally the Labour Party has been the supporter of more affordable homes and improved services. But the speeches in Brighton fuelled a growing sense of unreality: promises of higher spending on education and social services were not accompanied by corresponding proposals for cost reductions or tax increases.

The Conservatives highlighted the need to reduce public expenditure to meet the economic situation, while wishing to encourage the construction industry and local authorities to build more, using less grant. Inevitably that implies an increase in home ownership initiatives rather than renting, and there was no mention of how mortgages could be made available for people with small deposits. The bribe to councils to build more was a multiple of council tax to support infrastructure costs. The maths to this doesn’t seem to be well thought through as rents are unlikely to cover the construction costs. There was mention of reforming housing benefit but little about the way forward.

The Liberal Democrats’ ‘mansion tax’ sounded unworkable. They too emphasised the need to cut costs, although a long list of exemptions threatened to compromise this.

The challenge for all parties will be to maintain at least part of the social housing programme in what are set to be difficult financial times. Public pressure and intelligent debate about the options in detail will go much further than this year’s hackneyed party conference rhetoric.