The three main parties have now released their manifestos, and with only 3 weeks left until the election, there isn’t much time to take it all in. After scouring the manifestos we’ve compiled a bite-size list of what each party aims to do if they’re successful on 8th June 2017.
Conservatives
- Build a million homes by the end of 2020, with a further 500,000 by the end of 2022.
- New council housing deals to allow local authorities to build more social housing.
- Fixed-term social houses will be built and sold privately after 10 to 15 years with an automatic right to buy for tenants. Cash raised from sales will be used to build further properties.
- Commitment to halve the rough sleeping over the course of next parliament and eliminate it by 2027.
- £2.5 billion flood defence programme that will put in place protection for 300,000 existing homes by 2021.
Labour
- Invest in building one million new homes, with 100,000 of those being council and housing association homes.
- Insulate more homes to help manage the costs of energy bills, reduce winter deaths and meet climate change targets.
- Build thousands more low-cost homes reserved for first-time buyers.
- Guarantee Help to Buy funding until 2027.
- Give local people ‘first dibs’ on new homes built in their area.
- Protect home-owners who own their home as leaseholders and who are currently unprotected from rises in ‘ground rent’ from management companies.
- Make three-year tenancies the norm, with an inflation cap on rent rises, as well as looking into giving renters in London additional security.
- Legislate to ban letting agency fees for tenants.
- New consumer rights for renters to ensure properties are fit for human habitation
Liberal Democrats
- Build homes to reach target of 300,000 homes a year. Build half a million affordable, energy-efficient homes are built by the end of Parliament.
- Create at least ten new Garden Cities in England, providing tens of thousands of zero carbon homes, with gardens and shared green space.
- Set up a new government-backed British Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank to provide long-term capital for major new settlements and attract finance for major house building projects.
- Scrap exemptions on smaller housing development schemes from their obligation to provide affordable homes.
- Require local plans to take into account at least 15 years of future housing needs.
- Create a Community Right of Appeal in cases where planning decisions go against the approved local plan.
- Give local authorities the power to levy up to 200% Council Tax on second homes and ‘buy to leave empty’ investments from overseas.
- Introduce a Rent to Own model where rent payments give tenants an increasing stake in the property, owning it outright after 30 years.
- Ban letting fees for tenants, cap up front deposits and increase the minimum standards in rented homes.
- Stop developers advertising homes abroad before they have been advertised in the UK.
- Give tenants first refusal to buy the home they are renting from a landlord who decides to sell during the tenancy.