Tories' Housing Policy - “No carrot and no stick either!”

When the Liberal Democrats ran Cornwall Council, we had a good record of standing up to developers and making them deliver the required percentages of affordable housing. From 2017-2021, 4,000 affordable homes for local people were built in Cornwall. That’s more than in any other Council area in the country.

Elsewhere, Conservative and Labour Councils have repeatedly given in to developers who asked for affordable percentages to be reduced after they had overpaid for land.

Labour's Deputy Leader Angela Rayner opened her party's conference a few days ago with a vague promise to "get tough” on these developers if her party wins the next General Election. But the truth is that Labour Councils already have these powers and have failed to use them!

Where Councils really do need new powers is in controlling second homes and holiday lets. But whilst the Liberal Democrats have been calling for these powers for decades, Rayner didn’t even give them a mention. Labour’s focus is on big cities and northern towns: Rural areas like Cornwall simply aren’t a priority for them.

And as soon as Labour do announce specific policies, it rapidly becomes clear that they haven’t been properly thought through. Of the 85,000 households living in rented properties in Cornwall, just 35,000 rent from housing associations, whilst 50,000 rent from private landlords. Bad landlords are a menace and should be driven out of the sector, but it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Labour’s policies for private landlords are “all stick and no carrot”; if just 2% of private sector landlords sell up, this would cancel out a whole year’s worth of newly built affordable housing! 

Meanwhile the Conservative policies could best be described as “no carrot and no stick either”; they have failed to deliver the promised ban on no-fault eviction and ditched the (already weak) requirements for landlords to deliver basic energy efficiency measures.

So is the choice for private tenants “bad landlord” vs “no landlord”?! There is a third option! When the Liberal Democrats ran Cornwall Council, we developed “The Cornwall Responsible Landlords Scheme” which encouraged landlords to go above and beyond their basic legal duties. Two years ago when the Conservatives took control of Cornwall Council, I called on their leaders to work with our Conservative MPs and Government to give a tax break to those who meet the standards (including a commitment to charging a fair rent). This “carrot” would make it more financially rewarding to be a good landlord than a bad one.

Smart Liberal Democrat policies like these could transform the lives of tens of thousands of Cornwall’s most vulnerable families; but it’s clear that both Labour and the Conservatives are more interested in making speeches than in delivering real change.