Housing is set to be one of the biggest issues of the upcoming 2024 general election, with recent polling showing that it was the fourth most important to Britons, behind only Health, the Economy, and Immigration. Reforming the planning system to build 1.5 million homes in the next parliament has become one of Keir Starmer’s crucial missions ahead of the next election, while the Conservatives are planning bold housebuilding projects in London and Cambridge.
With this in mind, we have drawn on the expertise across our membership to put together a Manifesto for Housing 2024 for the general election, making use of our unique position as as the country’s cross-sector industry-wide housing membership body, representing organisations in the public and private sectors across the housing supply chain.
The Manifesto calls on all political parties to adopt housing as a top 5 priority, and to commit to a long-term plan for housing for as long as 25 years. The proposals include ways to improve housing supply, quality, and affordable housing, including:
- Reintroducing housing targets after they were scrapped last year
- Supporting local authorities to work together on strategic reviews of greenbelt land
- Tackling the skills shortage to deliver and maintain the homes of the future
- Ending the Right to Buy scheme to preserve the current stock of social housing
Chief among these calls is for a ‘Housing Accelerator Fund’, to build an extra 45,000 affordable rent homes. Doing so would cut homelessness in half in three years.
The Housing Forum is also calling on politicians to avoid damaging and inflammatory rhetoric such as ‘concreting over the countryside’ to describe building the homes and neighbourhoods needed for people to thrive.
Launching the Manifesto for Housing marks the start of The Housing Forum’s activities in advance of the general election. We will be making the case for a long-term plan for housing to policymakers of all parties, and fleshing out the depth of this manifesto with “Explainers” to lay out how its individual policies would help to ease the housing crisis. We will also hold events for our members to explain how housing will feature in the general election.
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