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General election 2019’s housing battlegrounds: Wantage
While the big topic in this election is Brexit, the housing crisis remains a top issue for voters in many areas. Inside Housing has travelled around the country to visit the marginal seats where it may influence the result. In the third in our series of five, Nathaniel Barker visits Wantage
On the day Inside Housing visits Didcot – the most populous settlement in the Oxfordshire market town constituency of Wantage – preparations are beginning for a Christmas street fair happening that evening.
The result here come 13 December will be very interesting. Incumbent Conservative MP Ed Vaizey – who temporarily had the whip removed for helping block a no-deal Brexit – is standing down, having held the seat since 2005.
It is now a key target for the Liberal Democrats, which overthrew the Conservatives on Vale of White Horse District Council at the May local elections, while also making sufficient gains in South Oxfordshire to form an administration working alongside the Green Party.
Sue Roberts, a Green councillor in South Oxfordshire, who was the party’s candidate for the parliamentary election but agreed not to run as part of a national Remainer pact with the Liberal Democrats, says the campaign against the “ridiculously over-egged” local plan was at the heart of those results. “It’s what I discussed with numerous people on the doorstep and was all over election literature,” she explains.
This isn’t quite your typical nimbyism. “The housing going up is not zero carbon and should be zero carbon now. Homes are generally really shoddy, being thrown up in such a rush, for greed not need,” claims Ms Roberts.
She also argues that the high level of delivery is doing little to bring down the area’s gulp-inducing house prices. “This is growth for growth’s sake.”
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Since May, the council’s new leadership has moved to scrap the stretching local plan agreed by their Conservative predecessors, but were blocked by housing secretary Robert Jenrick at the eleventh hour last month. The plan is intrinsically linked to the Oxfordshire Housing and Growth Deal – a £215m agreement between the county’s local authorities and government tied to the delivery of 100,000 new homes by 2031.
“There’s old Didcot and there’s new Didcot – and the two collide sometimes,” muses Alice, a youth worker at the council-run charity Didcot TRAIN. That reflects an impression conveyed by several people Inside Housing speaks to throughout the day: much of the development in the area is geared towards newcomers commuting to London rather than the local population.
“New housing is good, it helps people get better lives, but it’s going up without the right infrastructure and public services in place,” she adds.
“It’s flipping expensive,” remarks a woman with a pram. “My eldest is trying to get on the property ladder at the moment but there are too many houses being built if anything. The traffic is
horrendous.”
“I share the anxiety about the affordability of properties here,” says Kate Wareing, chief executive of Soha Housing – the district’s stock transfer association. “Everybody under the age of 40 is in housing need in Oxfordshire.” Current Section 106 policy in South Oxfordshire makes building social rent fiendishly tricky, she adds.
But whether this general sense that the area’s housing market is broken will be in voters’ minds here remains uncertain.
Wantage: constituency profile
Population: 120,402
Average house price: £335,000
MP: Ed Vaizey (standing down)
Majority: 17,380
Figures: Office for National Statistics
Nigel, who has recently moved into social housing at Didcot’s large new Great Western Park Estate, says his previous private rent was “astronomical”.
For him though, a Leave voter, Brexit remains the bigger issue – a recurring theme. Wantage voted 54% in favour of remaining part of the EU.
As the light fades on the town’s recently redeveloped high street and Christmas stalls are erected in drizzling rain, Inside Housing overhears two women talking about housing.
Council-run charity Didcot TRAIN (picture: Nathaniel Barker)
One is a social tenant who has just turned 30 and is hoping to get on the housing ladder soon, the other is a homeowner in her 50s with a four-bedroom house.
The former says she has a friend living in a three-bedroom terraced house with six children, two of whom have severe autism and another who is pregnant. She is reportedly considering making herself intentionally homeless in the hope of finding somewhere better.
The other says she has recently been informed that she could rent out her house for £2,000 a month, with her mortgage payments being only £300. “That’s just crazy – it shouldn’t be that much,” she remarks. “I think it would affect the way that I vote. It’s a massive issue round here.”
But, tellingly, they remain undecided about the election and while both support rent caps, neither know which parties are proposing such a measure.
The housing election: five seats where housing is influencing the race for Number 10
Warwick and Leamington
Gavriel Hollander visits a Labour-held seat where homelessness is an increasingly visible issue
Gower
Lucie Heath heads to South Wales to hear about the local crisis of unaffordable housing
Kensington
Peter Apps travels to a marginal seat in west London defined by the Grenfell Tower fire and housing inequality
South Shields
Jack Simpson heads to the North East to hear about a lack of investment in new housing and concern about Universal Credit
Wantage
Nathaniel Barker discovers dissatisfaction with new housebuilding in this Oxfordshire market town
