“Shadow chancellor Mel Stride has pledged to give young people a £5,000 tax rebate towards their first home when they get their first full-time job.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? Particularly for those of us who are (just about) employed. Who wouldn’t want free money? As one friend put it: “Well, that’s £5,000 more than I had before.” Another added, half-joking, half-desperate: “I’d vote for anyone if they’d just give me a house.” The sum doubles for a working couple – combine £10,000 with a Lifetime Individual Savings Account (Lisa) account and you’re laughing, the logic goes.
It’s a policy perfectly pitched to popular right-wing meme character “Nicholas, 30 ans” – the put-upon young professional forced to fund the social contract while receiving nothing in return.
In the usual format, Nick’s income flows to migrants, the NHS, and Simon and Linda – a pair of wealthy pensioners who use it to fund their P&O cruise. It’s this last cohort that makes up the backbone of the Tory vote – the median age of a Tory voter was 63 at the last election. Of course, this policy is more for them than it is for Nick.
The over-60s control more than half (56 per cent) of all owner-occupier housing wealth across the UK. In comparison, the under 35s control just 6 per cent. Although it sounds like it’s Nick getting the £5,000, Stride’s rebate is in fact just another wealth transfer to Simon and Linda. Nick has no one else to buy from.
It’s the policy equivalent of a child being handed money by its parents to buy sweets at the shop. Stride tells Britain’s youth to “give the nice couple the money now, darling”. Even the framing is paternalistic: “If only these bloody kids would get a job, they might be able to buy the home I bought for 3.5 times my salary in 1975”. The Tories can get around this by saying that the money can be withdrawn for anything, although it’s implicit that you really should spend it sensibly: “Not on food and bills, darling, mummy and daddy have a cruise to pay for”.
And how will Stride pay for this policy, this gesture of goodwill to the next generation of would-be Tory voters? Why, cuts of course, £47bn a year of them: to welfare, the civil service, and foreign aid. To everything except the pension triple-lock – the last holy grail. If Prussia were an army with a state, to quote Voltaire, then Tory Britain is a pension with one.
What then is Labour offering? A bold and simple plan, easily summarised in a single line? Or a series of small bureaucratic reforms, slowly tinkering with a broken system? For once, it’s a bit of both. The story goes, apocryphal maybe, that when offering Reed the housing brief, Starmer finished the call with three words: “Build, baby, build.” Thus a slogan was born. Behind it is one simple idea: Labour is going to do everything it can to increase housing supply, and with that, get Nick on the property ladder. Rather than fighting over an increasingly thin slice of whatever pie is left after the state pension is paid for, Labour’s offer is to make the pie bigger.
It’s blue-sky thinking, but is it rooted in reality? Labour has pledged to build 1.5 million homes by the end of parliament, an average of 300,000 per year. However, the number of new homes built in England during the party’s first year in power actually fell, down 8 per cent from the year before. It’s a legacy that Labour can blame on the Tories for now, but time is of the essence. In the meantime, it can always fall back on its trusty bureaucratic reforms.
On Sunday 5 October the government unveiled new plans, billed as “the biggest shake-up to the homebuying system in history”. Changes include requiring sellers and estate agents to provide more information when a home is listed for sale and introducing binding contracts at an earlier stage to help prevent chains from collapsing. The government estimates the proposals could save first-time buyers £710, at an initial cost of £310 to sellers at the end of the chain. A rare win for Nick it seems, but not enough to get him on the ladder.
While the two self-proclaimed parties of government battle it out, the Green Party has its own pitch: the “effective abolition of private landlordism”. Under the terms of the policy the Greens would impose rent controls, end buy-to-let mortgages and give councils the right to buy a rental property when it is sold at a discounted price.
The increasingly left-wing party would also set up a state-owned housing manufacturer “to mass produce high-quality mass council housing for local authorities”. It’s a similar pitch to Labour, but with the added bonus of hitting Simon and Linda right in the rental profits. It’s also not without intellectual heft. Nick Bano’s book Against Landlords is written in the same vein as the Green’s policies, arguing that simply building more housing – as Steve Reed proposes – won’t fix Britain’s broken housing system if landlords remain.
While the different parties vie for votes from young working couples, one thing is clear: only Labour and the Greens have Nick’s best interests in mind.
[Further reading: No, brownfield land won’t solve the housing crisis]
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