Natalie Elphicke is a non-executive director of a leading building society and a published policy writer on housing and housing finance with Policy Exchange and the Centre for Policy Studies. She was the first national director of the new Conservative Policy Forum.
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There is compelling evidence that there are only two tenures – social housing and home ownership – by which wellbeing of people is supported effectively.
Right now, a whole host of things are said to be top infrastructure priorities. Yet, remarkably, housing is not among them. This needs to change.
It both firmly believes in home-owning democracy and aims to be a friend to renters too.
For every safe home we make for our refugee neighbours, we could build up to another two or more homes to meet current domestic need, across all tenures.
Modernisation of the current arrangements for leases would bring the arrangements into line with modern housing choices.
This government must empower and inspire today’s young to achieve under it what their parents did under Thatcher and Major.
As well as a mechanism for home ownership, the finances must be right, too.
The UK has a poor record on home ownership, which has been in decline since 2003. Here is a potential solution.
There is a moral in the conflated row exactly a week ago over Lord Freud’s remarks.
The most likely impact of this policy is the national revaluation exercise in order to re-band council and national taxes that Labour was forced to abandon in 2010.
Housing association profits from social tenants have increased tenfold in five years – is that right or fair?
We need a property-owning democracy – not a rentocracy.
In our new report, Nation Rent, we set out how could people to rent and buy over time and as their circumstances allow.
Labour kept on trying to develop new towns. It didn’t work.