The front-runner in the Tory leadership contest has promised to “break down barriers” to support those keen to get on the housing ladder. A day after an outcry over rival Rishi Sunak’s plan to block new housing being built on the green belt, which experts said would only worsen the housing crisis, Truss risked similar criticism by saying she wanted to leave “housing which were imposed from Whitehall from the top down. targets”. Official statistics show that more than half of today’s renters could afford a mortgage, but only 6% are able to access a standard first-time buyer mortgage because most lenders don’t take the applicant’s ability to pay a certain amount of rent as evidence that they can afford to pay a higher mortgage. Truss said it would help “generation rent”, an upcoming overhaul of the system will allow rent payments to be used as part of the affordability assessment for a mortgage. The government has pledged to build 300,000 new homes by the mid-2020s, but Truss wants to “tear out the red tape that is holding back building” by committing to the target. Instead, councils should choose how many new homes their communities need to build, her group said. However, a Truss administration will “work with local communities to identify sites ripe for regeneration and reduce planning constraints – supercharging commercial and residential development”. The South West Norfolk MP said: “As a former councillor, I remember those harrowing hours sitting on planning committees. I will put power back in the hands of local councilors who know far better than Whitehall what their communities want.” Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Labor sources pointed to the party’s own analysis of English housing survey data, which suggested 211,000 fewer working-age people were homeowners in 2020-21 than in 2009-10. During the same period, private rental rates soared, Labor said. It comes after the Greater London Authority (GLA) warned developers in three boroughs that house-building in parts of the western capital could be delayed due to a lack of capacity on the electricity grid. A spokesman for one of the councils, Ealing, said that “in the midst of an economic housing crisis … it is vital that we are able to continue to build new, truly affordable homes to rent”.
