Liz Truss has pledged to help millions of renters buy their first home by making it easier to prove they are ready to take out a mortgage, but said she plans to scrap national housebuilding targets.
The front-runner in the Tory leadership contest promised to “tear down barriers” to support those who want to get on the housing ladder.
A day after the outcry over rival Rishi Sunak’s plan to block the building of new residential properties on the green belt, which experts say would only exacerbate the housing crisis, Truss risked similar criticism by saying he wanted to quit ” housing imposed by Whitehall from top to bottom.” targets”.
Official statistics show that more than half of today’s renters could afford a mortgage, but only 6% can access a typical first-time home buyer’s mortgage because most lenders do not accept an applicant’s ability to pay a certain amount of rent as proof that you can afford to pay a higher mortgage.
Truss said that to help with “rent generation”, an upcoming overhaul of the system would allow rent payments to be used as part of the mortgage affordability assessment.
The government is committed to building 300,000 new homes by the mid-2020s, but Truss wants to “tear through the red tape that is holding back housebuilding” by scrapping the target.
Councils will be able to choose how many new homes to build in their communities, his team said. But a Truss administration would “work with local communities to identify sites ripe for redevelopment and reduce planning restrictions – turbocharged commercial and residential development”.
The South West Norfolk MP said: “As a former councillor, I remember those painful hours sitting in planning committees. I will put power back in the hands of local councilors who know far better than Whitehall what their communities want.” .
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Labor sources pointed to the party’s own analysis of data from the English Housing Survey, which suggested 211,000 fewer people of working age owned homes in 2020-21 than in 2009-10. In the same period, private rental rates soared, Labor said.
It came after the Greater London Authority (GLA) warned developers in three boroughs that house-building in parts of the west of the capital could be delayed due to capacity shortages on the electricity grid.
A spokesman for one of the councils, Ealing, said that “in the midst of an affordable housing crisis… it is vital that we can continue to build new and truly affordable homes to rent”.