And they’re off…it would be great to think that housing will play a big role in this election campaign, even better to think that all parties will follow through with commitments to housing.
As I’ve argued before, there are enough different issues knocking around to make housing more prominent in this election than for many years. Whether it’s the BNP in Barking, the future of council estates in Hammersmith or planning for new homes in the south and Midlands there will be no shortage of passionate argument.
The connection between those issues may be obvious to anyone who works in housing but they seem unlikely to be made by the electorate or the politicians. And housing is far more likely to appear in local campaign leaflets than on national campaign platforms.
The website The Straight Choice is steadily building up a database of those leaflets for both the Westminster and council elections. Already there are some fascinating insights into which housing issues the politicians think should be resonating on the doorsteps.
For Andrew Smith (Labour, Oxford East), it’s action on bad landlords and the new clampdown on homes in multiple occupation. Could that late move by the government be enough to hold on to seats in university towns like Oxford?
For Nicholas Soames (Conservative, Mid-Sussex) it’s what Gordon Brown has got planned for his constituency: 17,000 new homes. In seats like his, the Tories’ pledge to scrap regional planning targets and give more say to local people could be a vote winner.
That would be bad news for the Liberal Democrats in seats in the south where it’s a straight fight between them and the Tories, so it’s no surprise to find that the message from candidates like Richard Burt (West Worcestershire) features a pledge about ‘protecting our towns and villages’. The same goes for Labour too.
In Liverpool Wavertree, meanwhile, Labour candidate Luciana Berger is making hay with the Lib Dem council’s refusal of funding to build new council houses.
And in Salford & Eccles BNP candidate Tina Wingfield (a former housing officer) is using housing as a key weapon in her fight to unseat former communities secretary Hazel Blears.
So housing will be there wherever you look in this election - even if some of the messages are more palatable than others. Whether that will translate into the sort of ‘long term vision for housing’ demanded by the Chartered Institute of Housing remains to be seen.
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