With just two weeks of campaigning left until the election on May 7, what can Wales expect on housing from the six main parties? WHQ compares the manifestos.
From housebuilding to new rights for renters, homelessness to social housing and immigration to energy efficiency, the debate during the Senedd election campaign has been passionate and wide-ranging.
The party manifestos will play a key role in determining the policies of whoever forms the next Welsh Government or, perhaps more likely, in the negotiations over the Programme for Government for a coalition or agreement between the parties.
This article presents WHQ’s analysis of the key commitments from each of the six main parties, presented in the order that the manifestos were published and giving each party roughly equal space.
WELSH CONSERVATIVES
‘Wales is in the midst of a housing crisis’, say the Welsh Conservatives, with Labour and Plaid Cymru failing to build enough homes to keep up with demand. This has resulted in sprialling rents, unaffordable home ownership for younger people and older people prevented from downsizing.
The party would scrap Land Transaction Tax (LTT) on primary residences, restore the Right to Buy and expand Help to Buy. It would aim to build 40,000 new homes by 2030 and adopt an infrastructure-first approach to new housing developments while also incentivising local authorities to make timely planning decisions and penalise developers who fail to build projects with existing provision.
The party says that scrapping LTT would ‘promote mobility in the housing market’ while Help to Buy would be extended to all first-time buyers and widened to include empty properties in need of renovation.
Restoration of the Right to Buy would be accompanied by pledges to reinvest sales proceeds into more affordable housing and protect homes from sale for 10 years.
Elsewhere, it would:
- Work with the UK Government to give young people a £5,000 tax rebate in their first job to help them save towards their first home
- Review the operation of Rent Smart Wales
- Establish a Fire Safety Fund to ‘end the scourge of unsafe cladding’
- Explore the introduction of deposit passporting for social housing tenants
- Implement a ban on new leasehold premises in Wales and move towards commonhold for new developments while addressing unfair existing leasehold arrangements
- Tackle the shortage of accessible homes via a streamlined adaptations system and a statutory obligation for local authorities to set targets for wheelchair accessible housing.
On homelessness, the Welsh Conservatives would work with stakeholders to develop a plan to eradicate rough sleeping in Wales. They pledge to end the use of hotels and caravans as emergency accommodation for families with children and new guidance to address delays in assistance for homeless people due to cross-border local connection disputes. The party would require Welsh local authorities and social landlords to give homeless veterans a top priority when allocating housing.
REFORM WALES
Wales faces a serious housing shortage and needs 10,000 homes just to catch up, says Reform Wales in its manifesto.
Among its five headline promises is a pledge to ‘put Welsh people first’ by ending the Nation of Sanctuary policy, stopping migrant hotels and scrapping international aid. The party would ‘prioritise Welsh men and women for social housing’. It would strengthen the licensing of homes in multiple occupation to ‘prevent migrant HMOs’.
Reform says it would ‘build homes in the right places’, speeding up planning, imposing clear time limits and limiting repeat consultations and intervening where councils fail to deliver. It would also repeal sustainability requirements that it says ‘have no safety benefits and push up costs’ and are ‘making homes unaffordable in parts of Wales’.
Labour and Plaid are accused of ‘failing to use the tools available to them’ such as the Community Infrastructure Levy to unlock investment for schools, leisure centres and other infrastructure alongside new housing. Reform would intervene where councils fail to secure the infrastructure funding their areas need. It would also allow greater provision for housing farm workers.
In line with Reform’s UK policy, the party would ‘enforce a strict 10-year residency requirement for social housing to put Welsh citizens at the front of the queue’. This requirement would be waived for armed forces veterans, domestic abuse survivors and care leavers under 25 ‘to prioritise the most vulnerable’.
Reform would allow Help to Buy Wales to expire in September 2026, arguing that the scheme is ineffective, with the threshold set too low for most new-build homes to qualify and that there is no evidence that it has boosting building in Wales. Reform would replace it with targeted incentives ‘whilst addressing supply issues that ultimately make homes unaffordable’.
The party would scrap the tourism tax and reform the 182-day rule for holiday lets, which it says has caused serious damage to small-scale operators, retirees and family businesses and distorted local economies.
Finally, Reform would ‘remove ideology from Welsh Government energy subsidies’, focussing them on ‘those on the lowest incomes who need help’ and terminating heat pump funding.
WELSH LABOUR
‘Everyone deserves a place to call home – a warm, secure, and affordable home is fundamental to a good life,’ says Welsh Labour in its manifesto.
The party says its record in government includes investing billions in good quality housing to buy and rent while protecting communities from ‘Tory austerity’: ‘Now, having set and met our most ambitious social housing target since the dawn of devolution and passed landmark new homelessness legislation, we’re ready to go even further with more homes and renewing our high streets.’
Pledges for the future include:
- End homelessness by 2034, with a milestone to have no children placed in bed and breakfasts by 2030
- ‘Unlock a decade of new housebuilding’ by delivering 100,000 new homes over the next 10 years, including ‘a minimum of 40,000 warm, low carbon homes for rent in the social sector
- Establish a new National Housing Taskforce to reform planning and construction and drive faster adoption of modern methods of construction
- Provide more government support for co-operative and community-led housing
- Ensure all new-build homes include energy generation as standard and solar panels by default
- Support energy efficiency upgrades to more than 100,000 homes over the next Senedd term
- Strike a fairer deal for private renters including a guarantor scheme to help more people secure a rental property
- Explore a ‘scores on the doors’ scheme for letting agents
- Strengthen rights for leaseholders and new-build residents by tackling charges for unadopted roads and introducing a framework to address building defects
- Expand Help to Buy ‘beyond new-build homes’ and continue Help to Stay for people struggling with their mortgage payments
- Introduce a vacant land tax to prevent land banking and encourage development.
On regeneration, the party would invest in high streets and transform empty properties into business and leisure facilities and homes and create a community right to buy to help keep ‘special local places’. Labour would bring more than 2,000 empty properties back into use and explore every option to give councils more powers to tackle empty and run-down buildings.
The party says it would make council tax fairer and explore expansion of the council tax reduction scheme piloted in three areas.
WALES GREEN PARTY
Housing is the second of seven priorities for the Wales Green Party in a manifesto that pledges to ‘make housing secure, affordable, and fit to live in’ and ‘get rid of a system that exploits people’.
In the private rented sector, the Greens would introduce a one-year rent freeze, including between tenancies, to provide immediate relief from rising costs. This would be followed by rent controls that would allow Welsh ministers to approve local authority Rent Pressure Zones where rent caps apply to keep rents affordable. Rent increases would only be allowed where landlords deliver ‘genuine improvements to homes’, especially energy efficiency upgrades. The rules would apply to all landlords.
The party would also:
- Ban no-fault evictions
- Extend the Welsh Housing Quality Standard to the private rented sector
- Create an independent housing ombudsman.
The Greens would launch a 10-year programme to build 60,000 affordable homes ‘with the majority built as social housing’. The party would also extend Social Housing Grant to cover acquisitions and use compulsory purchase to bring long-term empty homes into public housing stock.
Alongside this, the Greens would create a national housing developer to work with registered social landlords and local authorities to develop new social housing at scale and support collaboration between councils to pool funding and accelerate construction.
The party would ‘embed the right to adequate housing in Welsh law’ to require future governments to develop long-term strategies to prevent homelessness and ensure secure housing. As part of this, the Greens would invest in early homelessness prevention, ensure accommodation for refugees and survivors of domestic abuse.
Other Green policies include:
- Reforming home ownership by making all new developments freehold and supporting existing leaseholders to buy their freehold at a fair price or convert to commonhold
- A national programme to co-ordinate energy efficiency upgrades across Wales
- Changes to building regulations to require all new homes to be low or net zero carbon with solar panels and fossil-free heating systems as standard
- Support for community-led housing
- Scrapping council tax and replacing it with a land value tax that cuts the average bill while wealthier property owners pay more.
PLAID CYMRU
‘Everybody in Wales should have the right to a safe home at a cost they can afford’, says Plaid Cymru in a manifesto that promises to protect renters, build more social homes and improve the quality and energy efficiency of Welsh housing.
The party would legislate for a right to adequate housing in Wales, with housing policy including ‘progressively realising this right’, addressing homelessness, ensuring housing costs better reflect local incomes, supporting community ownership and promoting Welsh language and culture.
Plaid Cymru would accelerate the delivery of social housing, ‘delivering at least 20,000 new social homes by 2030’, and reduce regulatory requirements to building and buying in more social homes, including through ‘more balanced energy efficiency requirements’. It would also encourage investment in housebuilding by Welsh pension funds and establish a Wales Wealth Fund to invest in areas like housing and energy’.
Plaid Cymru would establish Unnos as a new national development body and social housing enabler. Responsibilities would include working with local authorities, land assembly, assistance with planning and project management, facilitating access to funding and encouraging innovation. The party would also introduce a community right to buy, including of land for housing, and support community-led housing.
On private renting, the party would introduce new measures including:
- Ending no-fault evictions
- Restricting rental bidding by requiring properties to be let at the advertised price
- Fair rent setting ‘through limiting annual rent increases to the lower of wage growth or consumer price index inflation, or a clearly defined equivalent benchmark’.
Plaid Cymru would make the renewal of Welsh housing stock ‘a national mission’ and expand access to retrofitting schemes by adopting a tenure-neutral, area-based approach while protecting crisis support for those in the most acute fuel poverty. Its new retrofit programme would include ‘practical and achievable energy efficiency standards’ to enable more homes to be upgraded faster and more cost-effectively
On tax, the manifesto promises to introduce a new vacant land tax to encourage more land to be brought back into use, work to make council tax fairer and look at how Land Transaction Tax can better support first-time buyers.
WELSH LIBERAL DEMOCRATS
‘A home is the foundation of a good life’, says the manifesto. The party believes that ‘everyone deserves a safe, warm affordable place to live, and we will fight to make that a reality across Wales’.
The Welsh Liberal Democrats say that many people cannot afford to rent or buy a good quality home where they live and too many people live in housing so poor it damages their health. Under Labour, it says, housebuilding targets have been repeatedly missed, affordable and social housing is at crisis point and homelessness remains shamefully high. ‘Rates of planning approvals for new homes in Wales are declining and are way below what is needed to meet demand.’
Meanwhile too many houses are built as leasehold and leaseholders still face large bills, ‘not least because of the building safety crisis’. And local authorities’ powers to build the type of homes needed in their area are inadequate, says the party.
The manifesto promises that the Welsh Liberal Democrats would:
- Build the homes that Wales needs, including 30,000 social homes, prioritising brownfield land and ensuring new developments strengthen local communities
- Make homes warmer and cheaper to heat with a 10-year emergency upgrade programme
- Urgently publish a cross-government plan to end rough sleeping and all forms of homelessness, ensuring access to prevention and advice services, and support multi-year funding for Housing First
- Ensure that gigabit broadband is available to every home and business, including in rural and remote communities, and support local bespoke solutions so that no property is left out.
- End the scandal of leasehold tenure, ensuring that all new homes are offered as either freehold or commonhold.
On energy and climate change, the party promises ‘bold action’ to cut energy bills, create well-paid green jobs and lead Wales to net zero. This would include:
- A ten-year emergency upgrade programme to make homes warmer and cheaper to heat
- A ‘rooftop solar revolution’ driven by new legislation to ensure that solar panels are installed on all new homes and large buildings plus car parks and other grey spaces.
The party would also create a £400 million town centres fund and introduce a Scottish-style community right to buy and new planning rules to encourage town-centre residential development.