Budget misses its ‘housing moment’

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

It was meant to be a ‘housing moment’ that would make a home ownership-based pitch to younger voters.

That was the line briefed repeatedly to the Sunday papers in the run-up to a Budget that will probably be the last before the next election with the Conservatives 20 points behind in the opinion polls.

On new homes, chancellor Jeremy Hunt did have some minor funding announcements for specific schemes that seemed to stretch the definition of ‘levelling up’ to include Cambridge and Canary Wharf. He also boasted that ‘we are on track to deliver over one million homes in this parliament’ without mentioning the more ambitious manifesto target of 300,000 new homes a year.

The ‘moment’ was never going to be about social housing or homelessness. There was a small relaxation of the rules on using capital receipts by local authorities and a six-month extension of the Household Support Fund, but the Budget included none of the measures called for by Matt Downie of Crisis in his piece for Inside Housing last week.

Worse still, the Budget constrains the options for the spending review that will follow the election even further.