But then, these are the kinds of ineffective (and often damaging) policies that get dreamed up when a political party is trying to play catch-up. Britain’s housing crisis has been decades in the making, with the Home Builders Federation finding that England is now the most difficult place in the developed world to find housing.
Successive Tory governments have failed to solve the problem, as they have all shied away from doing the one thing that would actually work: building more homes.
Britain’s housing stock is far older than its European peers, simply because we do not build enough. And because the population has kept growing, rents and deposits have soared. The average deposit as a percentage of housing prices in the late 1980s was around 12pc for first-time buyers – today, it’s over 20pc.
This kind of unaffordability is not a problem a government can fix overnight. This is particularly true when the Government has complicated the situation further by scrapping housing targets, making it even harder to deliver the homes Britain so desperately needs.
Until housing supply is increased, the market will remain terribly distorted. There will be no room for meaningful price corrections. As I wrote last year, the fear-mongering around a housing crash was always bound to fall flat (as it happened, no such predictions came true) – so long as housing supply remains limited, there isn’t going to be a correction to prices. But what’s stopping a crash is also stopping first-time buyers from getting on the housing ladder. There’s no gimmick or scheme that doesn’t involve building, that will fix this.
The Tories know they need a big offer on housing to hand to younger people this spring. With the tax burden still on track for a post-war high, and the inflation crisis sending rents soaring, some injection of hope is needed, as the dream of home ownership seems to be slipping further away.
But a half-baked scheme that could make workers even more financially insecure is not the policy answer needed to tackle the housing crisis.
If MPs are being honest with themselves, they’ll know this is simply not a good enough offer. And be assured, voters will know this is not the solution.
