Despite five of the Tory party’s finest megalomaniacs vying for power and using every tool possible to show their superiority and to stick the knife in their opponents, housing once again seems an afterthought so far.

On Friday there were two debates, one amongst Conservative Home grassroot members and another on that other bastion of Conservatism, Channel 4. In the latter, housing was not mentioned at all. And in the Conservative Home discussion the subject was raised as a question but batted off by all of the contenders with the usual mealy mouthed rhetoric around it’s ‘importance’ and familiar ‘first rung of the ladder’ and ‘we have to build more homes’ stuff – but without any actual policy or solutions proffered.

In the third such encounter last night on ITV… housing wasn’t mentioned at all. 

Only Liz Truss has broken cover over the weekend to specifically put her thoughts out there. The current Foreign Secretary and third in the betting odds to become our next Prime Minister has stated her intention to get rid of ‘Stalinist housing targets’ and will use tax cuts and regulation simplification in ‘opportunity zones’ in brownfield land areas to bring about more homes. Of course, as ever with housing headlines from politicians, talk is cheap and this aspiration seems not to be backed up with any real detail. 

So, in the absence of substance I have put together a flavour of which each candidate has said on the subject over recent years, if anything, so that we can all make up our own minds on what they all really think about the problem of insufficient housing. 

Liz Truss

In addition to what I’ve set out above, Truss has previously come out against the sanctity of the green belt and said in 2019 that one million homes should be built on the green belt around London. She is also on record as favouring the expansion of villages by four to five homes per annum without the need for planning consent.

Verdict: Possibly promising  

Penny Mourdant

Very little to see here where our industry is concerned except she previously touched on her wish to establish a taskforce to address stagnation in housebuilding – which doesn’t mean much at all in practice. 

Verdict: Lacking 

Tom Tugendhat

Non-minister Tom sits on the Parliamentary Group for Ending Homelessness (always ironic when you remember that MPs have at least two homes each). As a former military man he has raised his concerns over housing veterans.

Unfortunately, he did support Michael Gove’s crazy neighborhood votes scheme and has opposed developments in his constituency of Tonbridge and Malling. 

Verdict: Oops     

Kemi Badenoch

Kemi has some experience here and sat on the Board of social housing provider Charlton Triangle Homes. However, she is not on record on the subject of housebuilding much otherwise and has only been an MP since 2017 and so it does not seem to be a priority to this wanna be PM. The only morsel I could find was a throwaway reference to ‘the stranglehold of land-banking housebuilders’ and a swipe at immigration being the cause of the imbalance in the property sector. 

Verdict: Housing vacuum 

Rishi Sunak

Rishi has delivered Budgets as Chancellor that have featured housing announcements and most notably the temporary stamp duty relaxation in 2020, the £12bn affordable homes programme of around the same time and has stood in support of policies including opening up Right to Buy to housing association tenants .

So far he has talked a decent game on the sector but hasn’t delivered much otherwise and is yet to make any housing announcement as part of his leadership bid despite standing beside his old boss Boris Johnson this year when Johnson cited housing as ‘the most pressing issue that this country faces’.

Verdict: All mouth and no trousers? 

There’s not much meat here from the remaining five and only Liz Truss commands any awareness of the challenge of building more homes and has any semblance of a plan as to how to tackle such.  

Sadly, no matter who is elected to the highest office in the land, housing and the property industry are likely set to be relegated to the bottom of Downing Street’s inbox once again until such time that someone in government actually understands the problems and how to solve them – and that can only come with the recruitment of actual talent and experience and an uninterrupted mandate to put together a funded strategy and then be left to get on with is unhindered by the revolving door of housing ministers and resistant civil servants.

And no, fuelling demand with sporadic buyside incentives, whilst electorally attractive, do not solve anything.  

So don’t hold your breath on any innovation or big initiatives that actually get implemented anytime soon. But there is one silver lining in all this… Michael Gove has gone. Hooray! 

Russell Quirk is co-founder of ProperPR.