With the season behind us, now is a good a time to consider what we gleaned from this year’s political party conferences in Bournemouth, Brighton and Manchester, and the implications for residential property investors.
Aside from the usual political theatre, there were some useful clues to the general directions of policy. Housing certainly matters more politically than it did a year ago, and for that we must thank millennials. The vicious circle of ‘they don’t vote so why focus on them’ has been broken, and the battle has commenced on whose policy can tempt these young renters, and would-be first time buyers, into their camp.
The Lib Dems, perhaps keen to get their new leader off to a safe start, didn’t really offer much new in Bournemouth. Vince Cable emphasised housing inequality, ticking the ‘millennials’ box. Much of the rest of his speech, however, was established party policy and Cable rhetoric.
“We must end the stranglehold of oligarchs and speculators in our housing market. I want to see fierce tax penalties on the acquisition of property for investment purposes, by overseas residents. I want to see rural communities protected from the blight of absentee second home ownership, which devastates local economies and pushes young people away from the places where they grew up.”
Whilst that will go down well with the party’s 12 MPs, mainly in London and rural seats, it didn’t really offer much for the rest of the country, and the argument that speculators are buying up central London property to leave empty has to large extent been discredited recently by research commissioned by London’s Mayor.
Cable did promise a doubling of annual housing supply to buy and rent, but didn’t really explain how that would be achieved, beyond garden cities and garden villages springing up in places where demand presently outstrips supply. However, many of the places where demand outstrips supply are already urban and not where a garden city or village is going to pop up any time soon.