HOME OWNERSHIP: Affordable New Homes
Labour Manifesto 2017:
The number of home-owning households has fallen by 900,000 for the under-45s since 2010.
Labour will back first-time buyers to buy that special first home. The number of affordable homes to buy has plummeted by two-thirds under the Conservatives, so we will build thousands more low-cost homes reserved for first-time buyers. We will guarantee Help to Buy funding until 2027 to give long-term certainty to both first-time buyers and the housebuilding industry. We will also give local people buying their first home ‘first dibs’ on new homes built in their area to give them confidence that new homes will be available to them and their families.
After seven years of failure under the Conservatives, Labour will build the new homes first-time buyers need just as Labour councils have been doing right across the country, building an average of nearly 1,000 more new homes than Conservative councils.
We will back those who own their homes, including home-owners who own their home as leaseholders and who are currently unprotected from rises in ‘ground rent’ from developers or management companies. Labour government will give leaseholders security from rip-off ground rents and end the routine use of leasehold houses in new developments.
Stable Housing Market – taking the heat out of housing
House prices are so high because there are not enough houses. While this is true, house prices have also been pushed up by the hundreds of billions of pounds of new money that banks created in the years before the financial crisis.
Positive Money. Why are house prices so high?
A Labour government will review the fundamentals of our fiscal and monetary policies, reform institutions such as Bank of England and the treasury to ensure peoples basic needs for housing are addressed. At present housing policies favour those who use housing an investment vehicle rather than a place to live.
