Home ownership for under-45s has dropped by more than a million since the Tories came to power, new figures have revealed.
The English Housing Survey, published today, shows that whereas 4.46million under-45s owned a property in 2009/10, that figure fell to 3.41million by 2017.
Theresa May vowed in her conference speech in October last year to tackle the “broken housing market” – after an election which saw voters under-47 more like to vote Labour than Tory.
But measures announced in Chancellor Philip Hammond’s budget a month later were criticised for not involving any new construction starting to build the homes the Government says is required.
Labour’s Shadow Housing Secretary John Healey told HuffPost UK today’s statistics “show the scale of the Conservatives’ failure on housing.”
He added: “A generation are locked out of home-ownership and stripped of the hope of owning their home in the future.
“The government has got to do more to help those on ordinary incomes get a first foot on the housing ladder. They promised to build 200,000 ‘starter homes’ but not a single one has been built, and the number of new low-cost homes to buy like shared ownership has halved.
“Labour will back first-time buyers, with 100,000 discounted FirstBuy Homes and first dibs on new homes for local people.”
he Tories have repeatedly tried to get on the front-foot to tackle the housing crisis in recent months.
Communities and Local Government – and now Housing – Secretary Sajid Javid sought to bounce the Chancellor into borrowing more cash to fund a house building program.
A month before the last Autumn’s Budget, Javid called on the Treasury to “take advantage of some of the record-low interest rates that we have” in order to invest in infrastructure and house building.
Hammond ignored the call in his Budget, and his announcement that stamp-duty would be abolished for most first-time buyers was calculated by the Office for Budget Responsibility to increase house prices.
That analysis was backed up by a Treasury Select Committee in its report on the Budget published on Monday.
Reacting to the survey, Housing Minister Dominic Raab said: “The latest data shows government initiatives helped over 440,000 families onto the property ladder since 2010, while the National House Building Council report the highest number of new homes registered to be built for a decade.
“We’re restless to do much more, and have an ambitious reform agenda to deliver the homes this country needs.”