There is much ballyhoo in Labour's manifesto about building 100,000 new affordable homes, but you have to dig really quite deeply to find out what these "affordable homes" consist of. A read through their green paper elicits the fact that the vast majority of these affordable homes will be new social housing (hurrah!) and a small minority will be new homes for sale on subsidised land.
However, even here, "Labour have got it": from the green paper, Housing for the Many:
48. Low-cost ownership homes. FirstBuy homes will be a new type of home to buy, discounted so the mortgage payments are no more than a third of average local household incomes. The discount will be locked into the home so that future generations of first-time buyers benefit too. These homes will be aimed at working families on ordinary incomes, key workers and younger people. Shared-ownership and rent to buy homes will be other low-cost options included in this category.
49. A FirstBuy home in Warwick could be sold to first-time buyers at a 17% discount to the going market rate, allowing a first-time buyer almost £5,000 off a deposit as well as lower mortgage repayments. In Exeter, a FirstBuy home could mean a 26% discount and £7,000 off the money needed for deposit.
So well done Labour for presenting an economically literate housing strategy in a way that looks to the lazy like a Tory style get-rich-quick sell-off of undervalue land.
Debate Magazine
