What do the Tories plan to do about the housing crisis?

Politicians, and especially party leaders, tend not to like admitting mistakes, and still less failure.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Yet, in his recent television interview, Rishi Sunak conceded that it has indeed become "harder" for people to own their first home under the Conservatives, stressing how difficult it can be to build up a deposit.

Now, in the party manifesto, he has revived the Help to Buy scheme and proposes to end stamp duty for most first-time buyers if he is elected. Housing and homelessness have, for obvious reasons, become important electoral issues, especially for younger voters, and all the parties have had to respond...

What will the Conservatives do?

As Sunak said at his manifesto launch: “From Macmillan to Thatcher to today, it is we Conservatives who are the party of the property-owning democracy in this country.” The track record in recent times hasn’t quite lived up to that inheritance, but, to use Sunak’s own expression, he has some bold ideas about changing things.

Most first-time buyers will be relieved of stamp duty, and there will be a new tax break for landlords who sell a house or a flat to its existing tenants – no capital gains tax payable for sales in the next two years. There is also a target to get the construction industry to build 1.6 million homes over the next parliament, meaning a potentially significant increase in the supply. This will be done by “speeding up planning on brownfield land in our inner cities and by scrapping EU laws”.