General Election 2017: Conservative Party housing pledges

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© London Intelligence 2017

Below is a raw first taste of the housing pledges made by the Conservative Party in its manifesto for the General Election on 8 June 2017.

The Conservative Party pledges to build 500,000 new homes between 2020 and 2022, on top of an existing pledge to build 1 million by 2020.

Councils will be helped with low-cost capital funding to build new homes ‘but only those councils that will build high-quality, sustainable and integrated communities’.

Fixed-term
Fixed-term social housing will be built. It will be sold privately after ten to 15 years under an automatic Right to Buy for tenants. Compulsory Purchase Orders will be made easier and less expensive for councils to use. 

Specialist

High-quality, high-density housing in the form of mansion blocks, mews houses and terraced streets will be encouraged. Housing associations will be helped to build new specialist multi-generational and older peoples’ homes. Councils will have powers to tackle developers that do not build when granted planning consent.
Public land will be used to build 160,000 homes, a repeat of a 2015 pledge.

Rough sleeping
Rough sleeping will be initially halved, and then eliminated by 2027, by setting up a homelessness reduction taskforce.

There is no mention of the extension of Right to Buy to housing association homes, or of the sell-off of highest-value council homes to pay for the discount.

Source: Conservative Party

Paul Coleman, London Intelligence, May 2017