Newington's Claudia Hyde looks at what the Conservative manifesto promises on housing and planning. 

The Conservative party manifesto, an eighty-eight page document entitled ‘Forward Together’, notes in its foreword that “the policies set out in the following pages…do not offer a quick fix.” This very much holds true with their housing and planning policies, which combine a series of piecemeal reforms that, although not particularly eye-catching, offer some hope for both private and public sector housebuilders.

In fact, much of the manifesto is not new. The manifesto reaffirms the Tories’ 2015 commitment to delivering one million new homes by 2020, and boosts this with an additional 500,000 by 2022, and confirms the commitments promised in the Housing White Paper. The manifesto also remains loyal to Right to Buy, with a general theme of facilitating home ownership running through the document. No departure from these principles was expected in the build-up to the manifesto’s publication.

More notable, however, are Conservative plans to increase the amounts of social housing that councils are able to build. Recognising that many local authorities across the UK are struggling under heaving waiting lists, the party proposes to facilitate estate regenerations by entering into “Council Housing Deals” with authorities to help them build more social housing, and pledges to provide “significant low-cost capital funding” to assist with this.

In addition, the manifesto includes a promise to expedite the purchase of brownfield land by local authorities, allowing them to build more housing on these sites. The policy will give councils the option to buy derelict land below market value, and the Conservatives set the target of 160,000 new homes to be delivered in this way. They also plan to reform the use of Compulsory Purchase Order powers so that the process is easier and less costly- a pledge which has enjoyed a warm reception from the industry so far.

Although a fair bit is offered in the manifesto, what’s also notable is what the Conservatives do not mention. The document includes a pledge to rebalance housebuilding across the country in order to complement industrial strategy, but no details are provided of how this will be executed, or areas of national priority.

Many in the construction industry are also likely to be disappointed by the lack of any mention of the construction skills gap. Following Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, several leading figures in the industry, including the Federation of Master Builders, have expressed anxieties over their future ability to recruit enough workers. Approximately 12% of British construction workers are of non-UK origin, and uncertainty over the status of EU nationals resident in the UK is causing a lot of housebuilders to panic. That this isn’t mentioned at all in the Conservatives’ manifesto does not inspire much confidence.

Throughout the election campaign, Mrs May has hung her hat on providing the “strong and stable” leadership that the UK needs to navigate the uncertain times ahead. Just how much stability the Conservatives’ policies will restore to a notoriously unstable housing market remains to be seen.