Jumping on the bandwagon of other party manifestos, the Liberal Democrats intend to tackle the housing crisis ‘head on’, but it is lacking any significant reform to boost housebuilding and home ownership.
The Liberal Democrat’s want to build 380,000 new homes including 150,000 social homes a year, 10 new garden cities, and improve community led development - but how exactly will they pull this off?
Sadly not all the answers can be found in its manifesto. Of note, the party's position on whether it can achieve these ambitions with or without the Green Belt is unknown, despite this being a hot topic.
An important action the party has identified is properly funding local planning authorities, however the means in which they propose to achieve this, by way of allowing local authorities to set their own planning fees, will no doubt raise eyebrows and cause even more instability. While we appreciate the intent is to give authorities greater control over resourcing, we anticipate that the disparity of well-resourced planning teams will only rise between planning authorities in affluent and less affluent areas.
To reach their housing targets, Liberal Democrats place particular focus on existing brownfield sites, and ensuring that projects on these sites deliver affordable and social housing. We cannot rely on brownfield sites alone to resolve the current housing crisis. So we assume this is the reason the Liberal Democrats have set themselves an idealistic goal to deliver 10 new garden cities, but that solves nothing in the short term.
The manifesto is, however, the only of the three main parties' to make a commitment to all new homes being zero-carbon. In the context of the ongoing legal challenge to the December 2023 Written Ministerial Statement, whereby Lee Rowley reduced the powers of local authorities to implement their own carbon efficiency policies beyond Building Regulations, this pledge would at least provide clarity and direction for developers and authorities by creating a level-playing field across the country.