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May 23, 2024
With the General Election set, the UK finds itself in a deeper and more serious housing crisis than ever before. Private renters are struggling with sky-rocketing rents, social housing waiting lists hit all time highs and a heart-breaking 145,800 children are homeless in temporary accommodation with their families.
Buying a first home is now considered a luxury. Our latest research shows that for many young people, homeownership has become an impossible dream. 1.9 million aspiring homeowners don’t think they’ll follow in the footsteps of their home owning parents.
That’s because for those hoping to buy a first home, the gap between earnings and house prices has been widening while the shortage of new homes has led to rocketing house prices. Aspiring homeowners are increasingly dependent on the Bank of Mum and Dad to bolster savings. And that’s for those lucky enough to have relatives that can help. The new normal for first time buyers trying to make the sums add up is locking themselves into longer 30+ year term mortgages which costs them more in the long run – and sees them paying a mortgage into retirement.
The remaining government schemes left to help first time buyers are few and far between. There is First Homes which should help keyworkers buy local homes, but there are only a handful of developments available. Or else there’s Shared Ownership which is complex, costly and, in its current form, has many drawbacks.
Millions of voters will want to know the political parties’ plans for housing. We’ll be updating this article over the next six weeks – so sign up to our newsletter to get direct updates. In the meantime, here’s the specific actions we’ll be calling for. Let us know in the poll at the end which ones you support. Or please let us have your thoughts in the comments section at the end.
It’s quite frankly shocking to us that there isn’t already a coherent strategy.
Fundamentally, the number of new homes hasn’t kept pace with the number of new households, and as a result high house prices have made homebuying unaffordable for many. Successive governments have been missing house building targets for 30 years.
So now is the perfect time for a coherent housing plan that looks across all the tenures: private, social and rented housing. We need a healthy supply of every tenure to address the current crisis.
Housing targets should play a central role and act as a practical guide for local decision-makers to drive through housing plans in the face of NIMBYISM.
We can’t continue to rely on a handful of large developers to build the homes we need, so government needs to put in place the support and cash to increase the supply of affordable housing while also breaking down the barriers for smaller house builders.
It’s time to scrap stamp duty.
In our 2013 Stamping on Aspiration report, (yes, over a decade ago!) we reported on the astonishing impact the effect stamp duty was having on the housing market and called for a series of reforms.
If you’re buying a home to live in you shouldn’t have to pay this tax on mobility.
It’s a tax that puts off families from moving up the property ladder, fleeces homeowners needing to make a sideways move and makes it more expensive for older generations to downsize. It’s a tax that is applied every time a property is bought and sold. As a result people are choosing not to move. This inactivity limits the number of properties to choose from when buying in an already squeezed housing market. And the knock on effect of all these lost home moves percolates through the whole economy – with everyone from property services like removals firms, to furniture sales, to tradespeople missing out.
(We do however continue to support the 3% surcharge on buy-to-let and second homes, and the 2% surcharge for non UK residents.)
Find out more in our Scrap stamp duty campaign.
The only argument for retaining leaseholds on flats is so that management agencies and freeholders can exploit homeowners to line their pockets. It needs to end.
While the Leasehold Reform Bill is likely to make it through into law this month, and covers many reforms it doesn’t go far enough. We would like to see the next government to prioritise implementation of a wider reform to ban leaseholds on all new flats as well as all new houses.
Housing Secretary Michael Gove last year pledged to abolish leasehold, which he described as an unfair and ‘feudal system’. We agree. Putting a stop to building new leasehold properties by requiring all new flats to be sold as share of freehold or commonhold is a definite vote winner.
People having more rights if they buy a toaster than if they buy a house. That needs to change.
Britain needs more houses, but building standards and quality need to be upheld. New homes need to be built in the right places, and meet the basic needs of homeowners. We hear of far too many nightmare new build stories – which even Ministerial involvement can’t solve after they are sold to unsuspecting people parting with hundreds of thousands of pounds. We need to get new builds built right.
We would like to see:
A minimum of a 2.5% snagging retention – so that new build homebuyers retain at least 2.5% of the cost of the house, which would only be paid after 6 months. This creates a powerful incentive for builders to put problems right, rather than leaving the homeowner in the lurch. If things aren’t put right, or if the homeowner wants to sort them out themselves, then their costs should be deducted from the 2.5%. Such snagging retentions are common practice with extensions and commercial clients of housebuilders, but are not available to new home buyers. Read more about our proposal here.
A New Homes Ombudsman Service with teeth – created to mediate disputes between new home buyers and their developers. The current Ombudsman and its code of practice remain voluntary rather than mandatory. And the system is confusing for consumers with different builders signed up to different codes of practice.
Those buying a new shared ownership home have been excluded entirely. We argue that shared owners need even more protections, not less and therefore support the development of a wider Shared Ownership Code specifically for this sector and a code for Retirement Villages for those more vulnerable groups buying retirement villages which come with an array of fees and charges.
To offer new homebuyers a clear path of redress if they have problems with their newbuild property we’re calling for government to finish what it started and mandate that all buyers of new homes – including shared owners and retirement housing – have access to a New Homes Ombudsman
Home buyers and sellers continue to get a rough deal, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Buying or selling a home is too uncertain, takes too long, and is too expensive. One in three house sales falls through, and people can still be left with the costs. We need to make the buying and selling of houses more certain and predictable.
We would like to see a system that encourages only serious buyers and committed sellers. The offer the seller accepts should be binding for the seller. They shouldn’t be able to accept an offer from a third party at a later date – ie gazumping. Buyers could renegotiate the price if the conveyancing inquiries or a survey highlight serious problems, and could pull out before exchange of contract.
Another option is for the buyer and seller to sign a reservation agreement to show that they are ‘genuine’ to proceed with with the transaction.
But by having both parties bound to the transaction from the beginning we would expect the process to go much more smoothly.
March 25, 2025 
