Working to make government more effective

Comment

Can Labour’s housing ambitions survive contact with reality? Lessons from party conferences

The government is showing appropriate ambition and leadership on housing, but faces huge challenges if it is to deliver.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner during her visit to Bloor Homes housing development site in Basingstoke, Hampshire.
Angela Rayner during a visit to a housing development site. Labour has pledged to deliver 1.5 million new homes.

Housing was high on the agenda at this year’s party conferences. From Brighton to Liverpool and Birmingham, the fringe programme was dominated with talk of England’s housing crisis and the government’s plans to tackle it.

The Institute for Government hosted three events in partnership with Thakeham at the Liberal Democrat, Labour, and Conservative party conferences, with each giving valuable insights into how the parties are approaching housing policy: their priorities, concerns, and their vision for housing in Britain. Here’s what we learned.

Labour MPs are proud to have high ambitions for housebuilding 

Dan Tomlinson, MP for Chipping Barnet, and Chris Curtis, MP for Milton Keynes North, are both members of Labour’s ‘growth group’. Speaking at our event, they emphasised the need for new homes to fix England’s housing shortage and boost economic growth, both nationally and regionally.

Panellists at the IfG's Labour Party Conference event with Thakeham on housing. From left to right: Chris Curtis MP, Nehal Davison and Dan Tomlinson MP.
Labour MPs Chris Curtis (left) and Dan Tomlinson (right) with chair Nehal Davison (centre). Both MPs acknowledged that Labour's housing target is ambitious.

Both MPs celebrated Labour’s leadership on housing, which our recent report found has been lacking with previous governments. They know Labour’s target is ambitious, but stressed that this is exactly what is required to tackle the crisis head-on. As Curtis noted, big problems need big solutions:

“If I'd convinced you that we could easily build 1.5 million homes, then we should be trying to build 1.8 million homes, right. I want a target that you're coming on [this panel event] and telling us we can't achieve. And if we just miss it in the next election, so be it. We'll have got a hell of a lot more homes built in this country as a consequence and I’ll be glad we have done so.”

Intimidating delivery challenges lie ahead

Across all three of our events, delivery challenges were clear and daunting: construction skills shortages, chronically low capacity in planning departments, and a private housebuilding sector grinding to a halt amid an industry-wide downturn. Add to that, councils and housing associations unable to invest in new homes while grappling with uncertain long-term rent settlements, the costs of maintenance backlogs and the weight of new regulations. 

Our events emphasised the need for planning reform to accelerate building and get enough homes through England’s planning system. But any one of the delivery challenges listed above could still stall building, and the government will need a robust delivery plan to stop them becoming major blockers. Many panellists across our events felt that the government is likely to miss its 1.5 million homes target in five years’ time.

Peter Foster
Peter Foster, Public Policy Editor at the Financial Times.

As the FT’s Peter Foster summarised at our Labour fringe event, how much the government is prepared to invest is also crucial:

“If you want to look at [more expensive development like] brownfield remediation [or] affordable housing, the government essentially has to meet the gap between the market rent and the subsidised rent. Policy levers will not do everything, and insofar as Labour will not hit the 1.5 million, a lot of that will be down to the fact that there isn't the money to invest, unless we move on fiscal rules.” 

Construction workers working on a housebuild

Delivery challenges such as construction skills shortages could stall the government's housebuilding target.

The Liberal Democrats want the government to go further on sustainability

At our Liberal Democrat conference event, MPs and delegates pushed for the government to up its game on sustainability. Some pointed out that homes being built today aren’t carbon neutral and argued that net zero homes standards need to be rolled out faster. But the big question is: how can the government meet its net zero commitments, without putting the brakes on housebuilding?

Listen to our housing event at the Liberal Democrat Party Conference

How the government introduces new regulations matters a lot. But in the past new regulations have made it more expensive to build, and future regulations may similarly add to building costs. 4 Clarke, A., The cost of building a house: How has the thing we need most become unaffordable?, The Housing Forum, 2024, https://housingforum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/The-Cost-of-Building-a-House-Housing-Forum-Sept-2024.pdf  Some speakers called for developers to pay for future net zero commitments out of the land value of sites with planning permission, while others called for local authorities and development corporations to use changes to compulsory purchase rules to secure cheaper land and use the savings to fund making homes sustainable.

An IfG event at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Brighton, September 2024. From left to right: Lee Dillon MP, Anna Clarke, Nehal Davison, Tristan Robinson, Max Wilkinson, Sophie Metcalfe.
Panellists at our Liberal Democrat event. From left to right: Lee Dillon MP, Anna Clarke, Nehal Davison, Tristan Robinson, Max Wilkinson MP, Sophie Metcalfe.

For Thakeham – the event partner – building sustainable homes is firmly embedded in their business model. Indeed, at Labour Conference, their CEO Rob Boughton unveiled an innovative partnership with Octopus Energy to deliver sustainable homes that come with 5–10 years of zero energy bills.

Dan Tomlinson MP and Rob Boughton from Thakeham
Thakeham CEO Rob Boughton unveiled an innovative partnership with Octopus Energy to deliver sustainable homes that come with 5-10 years of zero energy bills.

How the government can build more homes

Fixing the housing crisis has featured in every recent UK government’s list of top priorities. But why have successive governments found it difficult to deliver on housebuilding pledges?

Read the report
A row of houses

All parties questioned how to make new homes work for local areas

Our private roundtable at the Conservative Party Conference – bringing together MPs, local authorities, industry representatives and housing experts – focused on how the party could make Labour’s housebuilding programme work for local areas.

While some attendees felt that Labour’s mandatory housing targets didn’t go far enough, others dismissed them as wildly undeliverable. A unifying concern was how the government could ensure that new homes are built in the best locations locally, to appropriate standards and with the right infrastructure. Participants felt that high mandatory housing targets reduced local authorities’ powers to argue for the standards of development that they want, as they would not be able to decline development that did not meet their desired standards without losing an appeal against the decision.

Max Wilkinson MP on the IFG's housing event.
Max Wilkinson (centre) called for better infrastructure provision with new developments, and better engagement between developers and local communities. Also pictured: Tristan Robinson (left) and Sophie Metcalfe (right).

While this may be the price of a faster planning system that gets more homes built, ensuring local areas share in the benefits of new homes is important for all parties. Both MPs on our Liberal Democrat fringe panel – Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) and Lee Dillon (Newbury) – called for better infrastructure provision with new developments, and better engagement between developers and local communities to improve local support for new homes. Likewise, at our Labour event, Dan Tomlinson MP noted that too often there is a gap between what is promised and delivered for local areas, and recounted a local example:

“There’s [a new development] near where I used to live where they said they were going to build this wonderful new play area for children... And [in the end] it was just one small, stationary wooden sheep. That was it... So I think we’ll have to do things to make sure that doesn’t happen, so when the new housing comes people see that it’s worth having locally.”  

New House Building Development Nightingale Gardens Stanway Colchester Essex UK

This leaves a tall order for government

The key takeaway from all our party conference events is that the government is showing appropriate ambition and leadership on housing, but faces huge challenges if it is to deliver – both on the 1.5 million homes in five years that it has promised, but also on quality, sustainability, and infrastructure standards. It is clear that there is cross-party support – but also, as our fringe programme showed, a healthy debate on how these aims can best be achieved.

The Institute for Government is grateful to Thakeham for its support of the IfG's Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservative Party Conference 2024 events. Find out more about Thakeham.

Related content