The government is considering a shift in its housing policy away from a primary focus on home ownership in an acceptance that many people on lower incomes cannot afford to buy a property and instead need help with renting, the Guardian has been told.
An announcement on housing is expected at the Conservative party conference, sources connected to housing policy have said. While it remains unclear what this will involve, ministers are understood to be interested in the idea of rent-to-buy schemes.
This general trend has already been signalled, with housing minister Gavin Barwell saying in a speech earlier this month that the country needed more homes for rent below market rates, as well as homes to buy.
On Thursday the chancellor, Philip Hammond, confirmed the closure of George Osborne’s help-to-buy mortgage guarantee scheme by the end of the year, saying it had a “specific purpose that has now been successfully achieved”.
Sources say that officials from Barwell’s department have been in discussions with Downing Street colleagues in advance of a possible announcement at the Conservative conference, which begins in Birmingham on Sunday.
While it remains unclear if this will contain a new policy or be more of a restatement of the move towards a more varied housing policy, it is seen a possible precursor of more radical proposals to come.
One recent report known to be circulating among ministers, produced by Renewal – a relatively small internal party pressure group that aims to make the Conservatives more relevant to working class voters, has called for the government to build 75,000 rent-to-buy homes a year.
These would be intended as affordable to people on low incomes, with rents set at no more than a third of the average local low income, allowing renters to live in the home while saving for a deposit to eventually buy it.
David Skelton, the founder of Renewal, said he believed Theresa May’s government was actively thinking about the issues raised in his report.
“There is an awareness that this is one of the greatest domestic issues facing the country, the fact that a lot of people are stuck in low-quality, private rented accommodation and can’t afford to put aside any money towards a deposit,” Skelton said.
“Given the language being used about the economy needing to work for everybody, it’s an absolutely essential part for that.”
James Cartlidge, the Conservative MP who chairs the all-party group on housing and planning, wrote a Guardian comment piece on Friday calling for a “one-nation housing policy” that took renting more seriously.
Cartlidge – who said he knew nothing about the upcoming announcement – said Conservative policy since the election had been “very much been from a home-ownership basis”, and that this should now change.
“I don’t think in doing that we recognise enough publicly that the extent of the housing crisis is not just about home ownership,” he argued. “It’s about a lack of palatable options for huge numbers of people. There are people who cannot buy or don’t want to buy, or it’s not realistic for a long time, and yet they’re still in the housing crisis.
“This crisis is the overall expense of all options, and therefore a response needs to have a multiplicity of tenures, and cater for those people in different circumstances.”
The Department for Communities and Local Government, in which Barwell is a minister, said it had no comment to make.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/sep/30/tory-housing-policy-overhaul-could-include-rent-to-buy
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