Theresa May has repeatedly declared her “personal mission” to fix the housing crisis. It’s a mark of the Conservatives’ loss of confidence on housing that it barely figured in Philip Hammond’s budget speech.

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There was nothing on homelessness, when rough sleeping has more than doubled since 2010. Nothing for private renters, when the booming number of households in this part of the housing market are crying out for change. Next to nothing even on home ownership, beyond the small-scale extension of a stamp duty cut to shared ownership properties, which Labour called for nine months ago, and a time-limited targeting of Help to Buy, which we proposed almost 18 months ago.

Compare this with the Conservatives’ hard-right and pro-market bombast in 2015, shown most clearly in the Housing and Planning Act of 2016. I led for Labour in arguing against that legislation. It was fatally flawed but it had a clear intellectual conviction that is now almost entirely gone from the government. Most of that act has also now rightly been dropped or kicked into the long grass, from the forced sale of council homes to “starter homes” for first-time buyers.

Eight years of failure on housing has forced the Conservatives to admit their policies were wrong and their political self-confidence misplaced. Neither measured up to the scale of the crisis people face and in many areas has made people’s housing problems worse.

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At last year’s general election, the worsening cost of housing crisis became a political crisis for the Conservatives when younger families and renters turned out to help deprive the government of its majority.

Our Labour argument with ministers over the past three years has been about basic political ideology, not just about housing policy. We maintain that the answers to the housing crisis lie in a bigger role for councils, stronger regulation of the market, greater government investment in new low-cost homes, tougher conditions on public funding or contracts and higher legal standards on a range of fronts, from fire safety to energy efficiency.

This is now a government that no longer leads but follows on housing. That has led to some welcome change. Labour ideas that were recently rejected by ministers appeared in the budget red book as government policy, including lifting the council housing borrowing cap and consideration of a greater role for government in masterplanning large sites.

But these baby steps make clear the problem this government now has. Forced to shed the hardest edges of its old ideology it is still wedded to big developers and a housing market that even the prime minister has declared broken.

The Letwin Review on housing, for instance, has some sound analysis and suggestions, but is totally enfeebled by the failure to grasp the problem at the heart of the rampant land profiteering in our current system – the rules determining the compensation paid to landowners. When Labour proposed common-sense and widely-supported changes to these rules, alongside a new national English sovereign land trust, the Conservative chief secretary to the Treasury branded it “deeply sinister” and shouted “confiscation” on social media.

Or take the lifting of the borrowing cap. As the Office for Budget Responsibility projections of current policy show, this won’t properly free councils to build new homes without also ending the threat of the right to buy and without significant financial support from central government, too.

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This was a budget that tried to demonstrate that Conservatives see the good government can do with extra public spending.

But if you don’t truly believe it, you can’t properly do it. The Conservatives can’t fix the country’s housing crisis because their basic political beliefs prevent them from doing so. They increasingly look like a party overwhelmed by events and overtaken by history. If the Conservatives can’t fix our housing crisis, then a future Labour government must.







