Election 2024: What have the Conservatives achieved since 2019?
How does the government’s performance since 2019 stack up against what it promised in its manifesto? Plus, who stands out among the record number of MPs standing down at this election?
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Promises to keep and miles to go
Whether it’s a reckless gamble that will help Labour come back from its worst defeat in 90 years or a stroke of genius that will win an unprecedented fifth Tory term, Rishi Sunak’s decision to call an early election will set records either way.
Most of the focus over the next six weeks will be on the campaign gaffes, the opinion polls, the manifestos and the debates. However, this also feels like a good time to give a final verdict on his government’s record.
In my last post, I wrote about the legacy of the post-2010 period as a whole. However, it’s also useful to go back to the 2019 manifesto and judge the most recent Conservative government on its own terms. After three and a half years and three prime ministers, how does their record stack up on 10 key commitments?
1) We will encourage a new market in long-term fixed rate mortgages which slash the cost of deposits, opening up a secure path to home ownership for first-time buyers in all parts of the United Kingdom.
Going back to Gordon Brown, prime ministers and chancellors have dreamt of an American-style mortgage market that allows borrowers to fix their mortgage rate for 25 or 30 years. Achieving this via encouraging lenders has proved more elusive, with no sign that they are willing to consider establishing the government-backed mortgage guarantee institutions that underpin the US market.
The search became more urgent after Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng crashed the economy and sent mortgage rates soaring. Even last June, Michael Gove was still talking about long-term fixes but Rishi Sunak did not seem keen.
The government did launch a mortgage guarantee scheme (without the long-term fix element) in 2021 as a successor to the one that was part of Help to Buy. This aims to increase the supply of 5 per cent deposit mortgages by providing a government-backed guarantee on new 95 per cent mortgages until June 2025. By December 2023, the scheme had backed 42,836 mortgages of which 86 per cent were for purchases by first-time buyers.
First-time buyer numbers in the UK hit more than 400,000 in 2021 in the wake of pandemic but were down 9 per cent in 2022 and 21 per cent in 2023 to fall below 300,000.
House prices have at least fallen in real terms since 2019 but that is thanks to soaring inflation and is little consolation for first-time buyers unless their earnings have kept pace.
There were more long-term mortgages than ever in 2023 – one in five first-time buyers borrowed with a term of over 35 years compared to one in ten in 2022 – but without the fixed rate element they are just ways to afford the unaffordable that drive up overall debt. Only the most blinkered Tory would claim that is a success.
Verdict: Little progress, 2/10
2) We will offer more homes to local families, enabling councils to use developers’ contributions via the planning process to discount homes in perpetuity by a third for local people who cannot otherwise afford to buy in their area.
This sounded like a reprise of First Homes, David Cameron’s flagship idea from 2015. Judged against what happened then (200,000 promised, none ever built), the 1,058 First Homes built in England in 2022/23 might seem like a success.
However, the government’s Infrastructure Levy looks set to channel funding away from affordable homes delivered via Section 106.
Verdict: Reality not matched rhetoric, 1/10
3) We will maintain our commitment to a Right to Buy for all council tenants. We will also maintain the voluntary Right to Buy scheme agreed with housing associations.
‘Maintain’ read like a signal that another flagship manifesto promise from 2015 would remain on the sidelines and so it has proved. Voluntary right to buy sales fell from 24 to just eight in 2022/23.
The government had said it would assess a pilot scheme in the Midlands that closed in 2018 before deciding on its next steps. So far there have not been any.
Right to Buy sales more generally are currently running at around 11,000 a year, in line with the average since discounts were increased in 2013/14. The pledge made at the same time to replace additional homes sold on a one-for-one basis has never been met.
Verdict: Not much of a commitment in the first place, 4/10
4) We will reform shared ownership, making it fairer and more transparent.
A new lease for shared ownership homes delivered under the 2021-2026 Affordable Homes Programme includes a minimum lease term of 990 years and requires landlords to meet repair and maintenance costs of up to £500 for the first 10 years.
That is real progress but, as the all-party Levelling Up Committee pointed out before Easter, it also creates the risk of a two-tier market, with existing shared owners (ie the vast majority) still on the old lease with full liability for repair costs and a minimum 99-year lease that will have to be expensively extended within a few years.
It’s still not clear to what extent leasehold reforms (see below) will help existing shared owners, especially where their landlord is itself a leaseholder. In the meantime, above-inflation rent rises, uncapped service charges, repair and maintenance liabilities and complex leases make shared ownership ‘an unbearable reality’ for many, said the MPs.
Verdict: Credit for new lease, big problems remain, 3/10
5) We will continue with our reforms to leasehold including implementing our ban on the sale of new leasehold homes, restricting ground rents to a peppercorn, and providing necessary mechanisms of redress for tenants.
The good news is that the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act made it through the wash-up process before parliament was dissolved. This bans the sale of (most but not all) new-build houses (something first promised in 2018), makes it easier and cheaper for leaseholders to extend their lease and tackles some of the more outrageous abuses of the system.
However, the government long ago abandoned the idea of banning the sale of new leasehold flats (which account for 97 per cent of the total) and had already retreated on restricting ground rents to a peppercorn. The proposed alternative, a £250 annual cap, would still have helped many leaseholders but it did not make it into the final legislation because of lack of time.
Verdict: Useful reforms but biggest issues unresolved, 2/10
6) We will bring in a Better Deal for Renters, including abolishing ‘no fault’ evictions and only requiring one ‘lifetime’ deposit which moves with the tenant.
No such luck for the Renters (Reform) Bill, which included both pledges but was not included in the wash-up and ran out of time.
Time should not have been an issue. The abolition of Section 21 was first promised by Theresa May in April 2019, but it took until May 2023 for the Bill to get its first reading and it was then held up for another five months following a rebellion by backbench Tory MPs. The Bill would easily have passed with opposition support but ministers instead tried to appease the rebels with amendments including a delay to the end of Section 21 pending reform of the courts (or indefinitely, campaigners feared). Now the rebels’ delaying tactics have paid off.
An early line to take on this was deployed by Grant Shapps, the first Conservative housing minister in 2010, in an interview on The World at One on Friday. ‘We were close to getting this through,’ he said, an attempt to take credit for almost abolishing Section 21.
Verdict: Abject failure, 0/10
7) We will bring forward a Social Housing White Paper which will set out further measures to empower tenants and support the continued supply of social homes. This will include measures to provide greater redress, better regulation and improve the quality of social housing.
A promise first made in the wake of Grenfell made it into legislation reforming the system of social housing regulation with new consumer standards.
Looking back to 2017, that represents real progress. However, much of this reverses changes introduced by the Conservative-led coalition in 2011 that abolished the standalone regulator and meant consumer regulation only dealt with the most serious failures where there was ‘serious detriment’ to tenants.
Following the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak as a result of prolonged exposure to mould in his housing association flat, the government consulted on further ‘Awaab’s Law’ amendments that set strict timescales for hazards in the home to be investigated and fixed and enable tenants to hold failing landlords to account by taking legal action against them for breach of contract.
The consultation closed in March. Neither the responses nor the statutory instrument implementing the changes had been published before parliament was dissolved.
As for that ‘continued supply of social homes’, see below.
Verdict: Qualified success, 7/10
8) We will also commit to renewing the Affordable Homes Programme, in order to support the delivery of hundreds of thousands of affordable homes.
The very existence of the AHP was under threat for much of the early 2010s so this was a welcome commitment in 2019. Output of affordable homes from all sources reached 63,605 in 2022/23, the highest since 2014/15.
Seen in longer-term perspective, though, the numbers were maintained by the switch from social rent to affordable rent and shared ownership made after 2010. Though social rent completions have increased since 2017, the 9,561 delivered in 2022/23 is only a quarter of output in 2010/11 and is still fewer than the number being sold under the Right to Buy.
We don’t know how the AHP would have fared in the 2023 spending review that has not happened because of the election but we do know that spending plans imply deep cuts in the budgets of unprotected departments.
Verdict: Recent uptick, longer-term failure, 5/10
9) We will also end the blight of rough sleeping by the end of the next Parliament.
The success of ‘Everyone In’ during the pandemic gave the government a real chance at fulfilling this promise. Instead, its rough sleeping snapshot shows numbers rising for the last two years to reach 3,898 in Autumn 2023. True, that’s still slightly fewer than in 2019, but the end looks as far away as ever.
The one bright spot is that the Criminal Justice Bill (with its dubious provisions for ‘nuisance’ rough sleeping) was among those scuppered by the early election.
The manifesto did not mention homelessness overall, but the surging number of families and record in temporary accommodation tells its own grim story there. They include 145,800 children, up 15 per cent on a year ago and more than double the number in 2010.
Verdict: A major disappointment given the context, 0/10
10) We will continue our progress towards our target of 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s. This will see us build at least a million more homes, of all tenures, over the next Parliament – in the areas that really need them.
We are now in the mid-2020s but the government has long since given up on the 300,000 target, though the impacts of the pandemic and Ukraine war provide some mitigation.
We won’t know for sure about the secondary target until the end of 2025, when net additional dwellings statistics are published for this year and safely after this election. The way that targets like this push accountability safely into the future is one of their attractions for politicians.
By happy coincidence, though, analysis published by the housing department with dubious timing on Friday estimates that the government will meet the target by the skin of its teeth, with a net 1,001,000 new homes built over the course of this parliament.
Prepare to hear the million new homes boast endlessly deployed by Conservative politicians during the election campaign but it’s no more than were built between the 2015 and 2019 elections, hardly the greatest of achievements.
More importantly, the government’s surrender to another group of Tory backbenchers over planning targets means that its legacy to the election winner will be falling output.
Verdict: Just beating a low bar, 2/10.
A record in reverse
My marks for the Conservatives’ overall record are of course subjective: at 26/100, Tory supporters might want more credit for their party while opponents will think me much too generous.
Overall, what’s striking across the whole period is the number of times the government has been forced to repudiate positions adopted by previous Conservative administrations, from Section 21 and deregulation of the private rented sector under Margaret Thatcher to the denigration and deregulation of social housing under David Cameron.
At the same time, scandals over building safety and leasehold have merged to raise fundamental questions about the housing delivery model that have only been partially answered.
As I wrote last time, a fundamental contradiction of the last 36 years remains unresolved. The post-1988 reforms of private and social renting were designed to increase rents to make renting pay for private landlords and help social landlords raise private finance to build new homes. The claim that housing benefit would ‘take the strain’ of higher rents sounded dubious even at the time.
Conservative governments after 2010 claimed that housing benefit is ‘out of control’ to justify a series of cuts that have instead left tenants to ‘take the strain’. The bedroom tax, benefit cap and failure to increase Local Housing Allowance went unmentioned in the 2019 manifesto. But they are now embedded alongside the two-child benefit limit in a system that could almost have been designed to generate poverty and homelessness.
The ministers standing down
At the most recent count, more than 120 MPs are stepping down at this election, including a record number of Tories and by my reckoning three former housing secretaries and five former housing ministers. More could lose their seats in the election to come.
It’s hard not to start with one of the last MPs to announce his departure. Housing secretary Michael Gove said he would not stand again in his Surrey Heath constituency just two days after reportedly telling Rishi Sunak ‘who dares wins’ as he praised his decision to call the election in the Cabinet meeting immediately before made his announcement in Downing Street.
Gove leaves behind a contradictory legacy. Of all the Tory ministers who have held sway over housing, he was the one who seemed to best understand the scale of the problems he was facing. He talked a very good game about housebuilding, including for social rent, tackling building safety and improving conditions for leaseholders and private renters and delivered improvements for social tenants.
His overall record is much more mixed, with leasehold reform limited by pressure from the Treasury and Number 10 and planning reform and renter reform watered down and scuppered to appease Tory backbenchers.
His immediate priority on taking office in September 2021 was to resolve the fire safety crisis that had developed after Grenfell and he drove though the Building Safety Act by the following year. However, further legislation was needed to fill gaps in the original law and End Our Cladding Scandal estimates that around 1.7 million flats still do not qualify for protection.
As for the other ministers, it’s farewell to Margaret Beckett, the veteran Labour cabinet minister who spent a few months as housing minister between 2008 and 2009, and to the man who will surely be the Pointless answer if you are ever asked to name all the Tory housing ministers since 2010. Stuart Andrew was in office for a mere 148 days, taking the title of shortest-serving housing minister from Dominic Raab, who is also standing down.
Now reborn as a free-market advocate of more housebuilding, Brandon Lewis instantly dismissed plans for extensions to existing towns and cities when he was housing minister between July 2014 and July 2016. This was the period when insane marketising ideas for social housing were at their peak, including extending the right to buy to housing association tenants funded by the compulsory sales of high-value council homes. He was the minister forced to justify them as he piloted the controversial Housing and Planning Act 2016 through parliament.
History will perhaps look more kindly on a final group of ministers associated with the ebbing of that marketising tide and the realisation, especially after Grenfell, that social housing had a value after all. As communities secretary between 2015 and 2016, Greg Clark inherited those marketising ideas and negotiated the deal over a voluntary right to buy with the National Housing Federation that quietly sidelined them.
Under his successor Sajid Javid, housing returned to the title of the department responsible for it for the first time since 1970. That reflected a new determination to boost housebuilding and it was Javid that first made the pledge to ban the sale of leasehold new-build houses that was finally delivered last week.
Alok Sharma became housing minister in June 2017, just days before the Grenfell Tower fire, and won praise for his courteous dealings with tenants in the run-up to the housing green paper. Theresa May, the prime minister who oversaw the rehabilitation of social housing and tenants in the wake of Grenfell, has also stood down.
Fighting a good fight
Parliament is not just about the ministers, though. Among the MPs stepping down are some of the rebels who forced Gove’s climbdowns on planning targets and renter reform. However, the list of those quitting also includes backbenchers who have had a more positive impact. They include Stephen McPartland and Royston Smith, two Tory MPs who battled against their own party to strengthen protections for leaseholders in the Building Safety Act.
However, the fondest and most reluctant of farewells must go to Labour’s Karen Buck. As MP for Westminster North (previously Regent’s Park and Westminster North), she found herself on the frontline of the housing question.
In the run-up to the 2010 election, stories about high housing benefit claims in her constituency regularly featured in the propaganda in the right-wing press that was used to soften us up for cuts across the board.
The claims were of course the product of the scarcity and unaffordability of homes that generated the surge in homelessness, temporary accommodation and families forced to move miles from their home area. A process that started in central London has since spread to the rest of the country.
She was among the first MPs to highlight those and other trends that she saw in her constituency work: the insanity of homes being sold under the Right to Buy only to be rented out at vastly higher rents paid for by the taxpayer; the impact of the loss of legal aid in housing cases; and the wave of short-term lets that followed deregulation in London and cut the stock of permanent homes.
Her greatest achievement, though, was probably the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018 that requires all landlords to ensure that properties they rent out are in a condition fit for human habitation. It’s rare for any backbencher to get a private member’s bill through parliament – this was effectively her third attempt - and this is believed to be the first time an opposition MP has done it since the 1970s. You can read Giles Peaker’s tribute to her and her work here.
Karen Buck served her constituents with distinction and fought a great fight on housing. She will be badly missed in the new parliament.