Rejoice or despair?

‘You are cold, lonely, alone. You hate yourself and you think you have no future. You feel like there is no point going on,’ a delegate tells Lib Dem members

He is describing the plight of a destitute asylum seeker - but he could just as easy be talking about the Lib Dems.

We are seven months out from the general election, his party is polling in single figures and is in very real danger of finishing fourth behind UKIP.

But despite this, the party has quietly put together the most progressive set of housing policies you will see going into the election.

It has pledged significant investment in housing, which it considers infrastructure as important to the UK economy as transport. It is the only party to take a principled and honest stance on the political minefields of right to buy and expansion into the green belt.

It has acknowledged mistakes on welfare reform and promised not to make them again. It wants garden cities, a state-capitalised housing bank, and greater flexibility for housing associations.

Essentially, it has adopted wholesale the list of asks most housing figures take to party conferences year in, year out.

But what should the response of the sector be? To rejoice that a party has finally listened, or despair that the Lib Dems have only come on board now they are virtually spent as a political force?

At the next election, the very best the Lib Dems can hope for is to become a smaller, less significant part of another coalition government. Its track record does not breed confidence. In government the party has supported huge cuts to grant, massive increases in right to buy discounts and the bedroom tax.

And what has it delivered?

The line pushed by Lib Dem spin doctors is that it has put a leash on the worst extremes of the Tories and won some significant concessions.

In terms of housing policy this means allowing councils to retain a portion of right to buy receipts for new build and gaining some flexibility for local authority borrowing.

This is a pretty miserable return. In fact, the party has now u-turned on right to buy and its own minister admits the borrowing flexibility has been nigh-on a waste of time.

So while many in UK housing will be pleased with the content of the Lib Dem manifesto, they probably won’t be rushing out to vote for them in May.

As Duncan Brack, vice chair of the party’s Federal Policy Committee, candidly said in a debate on its manifesto: ‘Our vote is public sector workers, students and intellectuals. We have done our best to fuck them all off.’

As it has the housing sector.