What Labour means for housing

Labour appears to be planning to make housing a big priority for its first weeks in power, which is perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it will have gained power thanks in part to the growing number of frustrated young would-be homeowners. We are being led to expect a housebuilding bill within three weeks of Keir Starmer taking power, to effect the party’s promise to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of a five-year parliament.

Labour’s manifesto suggests what will be in it: local authorities will once again be set housebuilding targets, abolished under Rishi Sunak. There will be an extra 300 planning officers, funded, so it says, with higher stamp duty bills for overseas buyers of UK property. The sites of a new generation of new towns will be chosen by the end of the year. To help assemble sites for their development, compulsory purchase rules will be changed to abolish what is known as ‘hope value’ – which currently means that landowners must be compensated on the basis of what could be built on their land, were they able to obtain planning permission, not on its present land use.