CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE 2016: Prime minister Theresa May pledged government intervention to fix the “dysfunctional housing market” in her final conference speech.
“We simply need to build more homes,” she said at the International Conference Centre in Birmingham. “This means using the power of government to step in and repair the dysfunctional housing market.
“It means using public sector land for more and faster housebuilding. It means encouraging new technologies that will help us to get more houses built faster. And putting in more government investment, too.
“It means stepping up and doing what’s right for Britain. Making the market work for working people. Because that’s what government can do.”
She also put housing at the top of her agenda for improving “social fairness”.
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“Ask almost any question about social fairness or problems with our economy, and the answer so often comes back to housing,” she said.
“High housing costs – and the growing gap between those on the property ladder and those who are not – lie at the heart of falling social mobility, falling savings and low productivity.”
“We will do everything we can to help people financially so they can buy their own home. That’s why Help to Buy and Right to Buy are the right things to do.”
She praised former chancellor George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse project, linking it to a boost of foreign direct investment in the region at “double the rate” of the rest of the country.
But she said that success now needed to be built on and delivered in other cities across the country.
Housing was put forward as part of the government’s wider industrial strategy.
Led by Greg Clark, secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy, May said the government would identify sectors of the economy – financial services, life sciences, tech, aerospace, car manufacturing and the creative industries – and do “everything we can to encourage, develop and support them.”
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