Prime minister Rishi Sunak launched the Conservative Party 2024 manifesto at the Silverstone racing circuit, with the slogan: “Clear Plan, Bold Action, Secure Future”
The Conservative Party’s 2024 manifesto promises to cut taxes by £17.2bn by 2030, increasing defence spending and halving net migration.
Most pertinently to UK construction, the Conservative Party manifesto pledges to build 1.6m new houses in England by the next parliament, through:
- Abolishing nutrient neutrality, instead requiring developers to pay a “one-off mitigation fee”
- Fast-tracking brownfield residential developments in cities
- Raising density in inner London to levels seen in Paris and Barcelona through regeneration and more brownfield
- Protecting the Green Belt through focusing new homes delivery in urban areas
- Creating locally-led urban development corporations in cities like Leeds, Liverpool and York to enable urban regeneration
- Forcing councils to set aside land for smaller developers and lifting Section 106 burdens on smaller sites
- Tying local council’s use of the Infrastructure Levy specifically to infrastructure that supports homes
- Renewing the Affordable Homes Program to regenerate and improve housing estates
- Continuing the existing cladding remediation scheme.
For those curently on or looking to join the property ladder, the manifesto promises:
- Making the 2022 Stamp Duty threshold permanent
- Launching a “new and improved” Help to Buy scheme, which will provide first-time buyers with a 20% equity loan and allow them to get a 5% deposit on interest terms they can afford
- The manifesto promises to pass a Renters Reform Bill for “landlords and renters alike”, with the court reforms to “fully abolish” Section 21, whilst strengthening other grounds for landlords to evict anti-social tenants
- Similarly, social housing will be subject to ‘Local Connection’ and ‘UK Connection’ tests, as well as a three-strike system for anti-social tenants
- Capping ground rents at £250.
Labour leader Keir Starmer had the sharper response of condemning the Conservative 2024 manifesto as “a Jeremy Corbyn-style manifesto[…] load everything into the wheelbarrow, don’t provide the funding and hope that nobody notices,” to reporters in Middlesborough.
“The money isn’t there, it is a recipe for five more years of chaos.”
Justin Young, CEO at RICS, said: “Having delivered only 2.5m homes over the last 14 years, the Conservative party has made an ambitious pledge to build 1.6m homes over the next five years. That is over 300,000 new homes a year – which hasn’t been achieved since the sixties, a period during which the public sector and SME housebuilders had a far greater role in housing delivery. While it’s encouraging to see the Conservatives committing themselves to supporting small builders, this will not address the quagmire of laws that make up Britain’s restrictive and politically permeated planning system.
“We welcome any initiative that helps first-time buyers, but demand-side solutions must be combined with workable supply-side solutions. To begin improving affordability levels the UK must build more housing; there is currently a shortfall of 4.3m homes in the UK by some estimates.
“While a stamp duty cut would help in the short-term by enabling more buyers onto the first rung of the property ladder, it’s vital that we learn lessons from the past and introduce policies that address the plethora of structural issues that exist within house building. Supply must be addressed across all tenures, otherwise with Help to Buy 2.0 we risk a repeat of the negatives of the first scheme. While it did provide support for first time buyers, and gave confidence to housebuilders, it also inflated house prices across England, left thousands of buyers at risk of negative equity and failed to deliver good value for money for the taxpayer.”
Increased urban development may not be a long-term solution
Alun Williams, partner at city law firm Spector Constant & Williams said: “The announcement of a fast track planning system in the largest 20 cities, will ultimately come down to the detail. My initial perception however is that the Conservatives have adopted a sticking plaster approach to a system than needs major surgery.”
Sav Patel, associate director at Lanpro Services, said: “The Conservative manifesto for this election has a high headline figure for housebuilding: 1.6m homes over the term of the parliament, or 320,000 homes per year – representing a significant increase on the million homes built over the current parliament. However, the mechanisms set out to achieve this are unbalanced.
There is an emphasis on major urban areas, with faster planning permissions for brownfield sites, higher densities in London and more urban development corporations. Bringing forward this type of development is often complex and lengthy. There is no encouragement for higher delivery rates in the rest of the country.
“Meanwhile, the Conservatives are offering a ‘cast-iron’ protection for the Green Belt, which stands in contrast to Labour’s proposed review of Green Belt policy.
“There are some welcome detailed policies. The manifesto suggests ‘abolishing’ nutrient neutrality rules, to be replaced by a ‘one-off mitigation fee’ for each development. And there is support for small builders, with a new type of allocation for land for them as well as further exceptions from Section 106 obligations.”
The scope of planning reform must spread beyond brownfield
Karen Charles, executive director, Boyer (part of Leaders Romans Group) said: “Whilst no-one will dispute that development should be directed to urban brownfield sites first, the reality is that there is also a need and demand for homes in less urban locations, which often requires development on undeveloped greenfield sites as brownfield sites are unavailable.
“Indeed, if the Prime Minister is going to achieve the increase in housebuilding as set out in the Manifesto, then the Government will need to reform the planning system and relax some planning restrictions which make it so time-consuming to prepare development plans, and so difficult to secure planning permission and deliver new homes in locations where people really want to live.
“The Conservative Party Manifesto on planning and housing is commendable, but all indications are that the constraints to housing delivery particularly houses outside less urban areas, by the apparent sole focus on delivering homes on brownfield sites in urban locations, will continue.”
