The personal is political and all that, so when I think about the crisis of British housing, I start with my home. It was built in 1901, at the tail-end of the Victorian housing boom in which six million homes were built over six decades. It’s a classic three-bed terrace, located near a railway station on the outskirts of London that was designed to carry workers into the City. Not wealthy bankers, but lower-middle-class clerks and admin staff who could support multiple children on a single salary. I won’t tell you how much we paid for it in 2023, but let’s just say two mid-career professionals pooling their resources could only afford it because the previous owners had let it get so dilapidated it was structurally unsound.
I don’t have to explain all the ways in which this is suboptimal for a functioning society. More interesting is what our political overlords think we should do about it. Tory party conference season came to a close with Kemi Badenoch’s rabbit-out-of-a-hat announcement that the Tories would abolish stamp duty – just as soon as they win the next election. This is a very different approach from the Greens, who had wrapped up their conference a few days before by voting to abolish landlords.
Of the two, I come down on the Badenoch side. Stamp duty is a tax on moving house, which logical people respond to by avoiding moving unless absolutely necessary. It penalises people wanting to upsize to start or grow families. Worse, it penalises people wanting to downsize, which means fewer homes for those expanding their families to move into. While abolishing stamp duty (which Conservatives say will cost £9bn) looks on paper like it will benefit the rich the most, more moving at the top end of the market frees up homes for those further down the chain. And yes, this applies even if the savings get added on to house prices. There is a material difference between owning an asset worth £620,000 and owning an asset worth £600,000 while shelling out £20,000 in tax (particularly when the time comes to sell it). Oh, and according to YouGov, 63 per cent of Brits are in favour.
Abolishing private landlords doesn’t do any of that. It might lead to more homes for sale as landlords exit the market, but that just reduces the number of rental properties. Good news if you’re a renter on the cusp of being able to buy a home; bad news for the rest.
What these policies have in common is that neither tackles the big problem: we don’t have enough houses. The Centre for Cities estimates that there are 4.3 million “missing homes” – that is, homes that should have been built to fill rising demand but weren’t. You can try to shuffle around the existing stock more efficiently, but without mass housebuilding, it’s just tinkering.
Admittedly, the Green plan is meant to come with a side order of council-house building (though given the Greens’ aversion to basically any development scheme, it’s hard to take this seriously). The Conservatives are in a similar quandary. Despite the Tory Yimbys’ best efforts, the party’s preferences are evident from its 14-year failure to build anywhere near enough homes.
It’s a challenge Labour is trying to rectify. The Housing Secretary, Steve Reed, on whose shoulders the government’s target of 1.5 million new homes rests, was autographing red caps with the Maga-esque slogan “Build baby build!” to adoring fans at Labour’s conference. We’ll see how Reed gets on with Labour’s own Nimby factions, but at least there’s a clear goal. Once those homes exist, we can have conversations about who should own them and how they should be taxed. Until they do, everything else is a distraction.
A family on a single, relatively modest income could afford the house I now live in 120-odd years ago thanks in part to accessible borrowing from building societies, but more importantly because the Victorians built a sufficient number of houses. That an equivalent family couldn’t afford to do so today is a policy choice – and a bad one. We know how to fix it. Build, baby, build!
[Further reading: Who is Jonathan Powell?]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor
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