Affordable housing: where the UK parties stand
Can I afford a decent home, to rent or buy, near my life?
Independent, source-checked analysis of how each party’s policies would affect this — judged on the evidence, without telling the system who proposed them. How this works.
Labour — 9 policies affect this: 5 helps · 2 little effect · 2 mixed. Compare interactively →
Build 1.5 Million New Homes and Reform Planning — helps. This policy sets out the most ambitious and wide-ranging housing supply push in decades, with planning reform, grey belt land release, and compulsory purchase reform all pointing toward more homes. Ho…
Increase Social and Affordable Housing — helps. This policy makes a serious attempt to boost social and affordable housing through new funding, stronger planning rules, and Right to Buy reforms — but even on optimistic projections it only partially…
Reduce Child Poverty and Reform Universal Credit — helps. Banning no-fault evictions improves security of tenure for renters, which is a real gain for housing stability. However, the policy does not tackle house prices, rents as a share of income, or social …
Reform Private Rented Sector Regulation and End Leasehold — helps. This policy improves security and fairness for renters and leaseholders — abolishing no-fault evictions, extending housing standards rules, and reforming leasehold — but may reduce rental supply if la…
End Homelessness and Support Children in Care — helps. The policy includes real funding commitments and concrete steps — like abolishing no-fault evictions and a published homelessness strategy with targets — that should modestly help the most housing-ins…
Conservative — 14 policies affect this: 6 mixed · 4 hurts · 2 little effect · 2 helps. Compare interactively →
Improve Social Housing Allocation and Management — hurts. This policy restricts who can access social housing through residency tests and makes it easier to evict tenants for bad behaviour, but adds no new homes. Evidence suggests the restrictions could push…
Pledge Not to Increase Family Home Taxes — hurts. This pledge locks in a council tax system that experts say unfairly burdens lower-income households and keeps Stamp Duty rules that slow people from moving to homes they can afford. The main cost is w…
Protect Right to Buy Discounts — hurts. Protecting high Right to Buy discounts helps individual council tenants buy their homes, but the evidence strongly shows RTB has shrunk the social housing stock far faster than replacements can be bui…
Complete Leasehold Reform — helps. This policy would cap ground rents for existing leaseholders and make it easier to switch to commonhold ownership, saving millions of households billions of pounds over time. The main caveat is that k…
Pass Renters Reform Bill — helps. Abolishing no-fault evictions and giving tenants the right to challenge unfair rent rises would make renting more secure and fairer, especially for lower-income households. The main risk is that heavi…
Liberal Democrat — 11 policies affect this: 9 helps · 2 mixed. Compare interactively →
Empower Local Authorities to End Right to Buy — helps. Letting councils choose to stop the Right to Buy would slow the loss of social homes, protecting the most affordable housing for people on low incomes. The catch is that councils must also build more …
End Rough Sleeping and Scrap Vagrancy Act — helps. This policy introduces a legal duty to provide safe accommodation, repeals a law that criminalised rough sleepers, and backs a national homelessness plan with over £3.6 billion in funding — all of whi…
Abolish Residential Leaseholds and Cap Ground Rents — helps. This policy would give millions of leaseholders more control over their homes, cut ground rent bills, and protect them from cladding remediation costs — all real gains for housing security. The main c…
Local Authority Powers to Control Second Homes and Short-Term Lets — helps. Allowing councils to charge up to 500% council tax on second homes and create a new planning class for short-term lets could nudge some properties back into the residential market, helping affordabili…
Repeal Discriminatory 'Right to Rent' Scheme — helps. Scrapping Right to Rent would remove a scheme that courts and surveys show causes landlords to discriminate against non-British-looking renters, improving housing access for ethnic minorities and migr…
Reform UK — 10 policies affect this: 3 mixed · 3 hurts · 2 little effect · 2 helps. Compare interactively →
Evict foreign nationals from social housing (three-month rule) — hurts. This policy would force foreign nationals out of social housing into private renting within three months, likely increasing homelessness rather than freeing up meaningful social housing stock — becaus…
Cut residential stamp duty — hurts. Cutting stamp duty to zero below £750,000 would put more money in buyers' pockets short-term, but credible analysts warn this mostly gets absorbed into higher house prices rather than making homes che…
Reform the planning system to fast-track housing and infrastructure on brownfield sites — helps. Fast-tracking planning and tax incentives for brownfield housing should help add new homes, particularly in neglected regions, but brownfield development is complex and costly, so delivery may fall we…
Abolish the Renters' (Reform) Bill — hurts. This policy would remove key protections for renters — including eviction safeguards, decent homes standards, and rent-increase limits — while scrapping a landlord tax rule that could modestly boost r…
Protect leaseholders and simplify lease extensions — helps. This policy aims to make it cheaper and easier for leaseholders to extend their leases or buy their freeholds, building on reforms already in law. The benefit is real but limited — most of the 5 milli…
Green — 6 policies affect this: 3 helps · 2 mixed · 1 little effect. Compare interactively →
Build new social homes and end Right to Buy — helps. Building 150,000 social homes a year and ending Right to Buy would directly tackle the shortage of affordable homes at social rents, which experts say is around 90,000–150,000 a year. The main caveat …
Increase Universal Credit, benefits, and pensions — helps. This policy raises incomes for low-income renters and scraps the bedroom tax, directly improving housing affordability for hundreds of thousands of social tenants and benefit claimants. It does not ad…
Reform property taxes towards a Land Value Tax — helps. This policy contains promising ideas — especially updating Council Tax bands and taxing empty properties — that evidence suggests would modestly help lower-income renters and bring vacant homes into u…
Empower local authorities to introduce rent controls and strengthen tenants' rights — mixed. This package of measures would meaningfully improve security and stability for existing private renters, but rent controls in particular risk reducing the supply of rental homes and pushing up rents f…
Reform the planning system for sustainable development and protect green spaces — mixed. This policy pulls in opposite directions on housing affordability: small-site planning reforms could add more homes faster, but Green Belt protection limits land supply and Passivhaus/solar standards …