Housing Needs: Young People

Gideon Amos Excerpts

Thursday 16th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Ms Butler. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray) was the driving force behind securing this debate, the application for which I supported, and I congratulate her on doing so. I should declare an interest as a social landlord. I thank all other Members who have taken part in this important debate, including my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George), who restated the excellent case for planning controls on second homes.

I support that proposal because at its heart, housing is the single biggest issue affecting young people’s lives. Whether owning or renting, housing dominates their futures. A decent and affordable home is fundamental and the starting point for all other freedoms. That is why it was a Liberal Government who invented council housing and rolled it out. Liberals such as William Beveridge identified poor housing as the chief cause of squalor—one of the giants that any progressive Government would want to overcome.

The Liberal Democrats welcome the Government’s commitment to the £3.9 billion per year for social and affordable housing, but we urge them to go further and faster; I will return to how my party would do that. We also campaigned for an end to no-fault evictions and therefore supported the Renters’ Rights Act. Ending no-fault evictions was long overdue; the Conservatives failed to deliver on that.

While pragmatic improvements to the planning system are always welcome, the Government’s planning changes, which are focused on printing permissions for private sector housebuilders at the expense of locally elected councillors and communities having their say, will not bring the lower house prices that young people desperately need. That never has, and it never will. We need an approach that will not only deliver lower rents but help a new generation get the chance to buy a home of their own. That was an aspiration that felt achievable for my generation, but for too many younger people, seems like a fantasy. It is an injustice that we need to address.

Average deposits have more than doubled as a share of income in almost every region of the country compared with 30 years ago, and that is even higher in London. Saving for a deposit in the first place has never been harder, because rents are higher than ever both in real terms and as a percentage of income, as we have heard from other hon. Members. Nearly half of 24-year-olds are now living at home with their parents, up from just over a third a decade ago. As one of my constituents put it, he has paid more in rent over the last 20 years than the value of a house, yet he does not own one breeze block and has little hope of his three children getting a home of their own.

For the most vulnerable young people, the consequences go further than deferred aspiration. Last year, an estimated 124,000 young people approached their local authority because they were homeless or at risk of homelessness—a 6% rise on the previous year. One young person is facing homelessness every four minutes. That pushes people out of education and work, and into a cycle that is hard to escape. Crisis found that 58% of employers are less likely to hire someone experiencing homelessness, and the welfare system is not helping. Under-35s are only eligible for the shared accommodation rate—a lower housing benefit entitlement to cover shared accommodation, at a time when the number of houses in multiple occupation has fallen by 10% since 2019. The shared accommodation rate is a false economy. Our manifesto committed to abolishing it in its application to homeless people. They should not be penalised for being homeless.

Many leaseholders who have bought are facing potential negative equity as the cost of remediation or unfair and mounting service charges and ground rents accumulate. It is time to abolish residential leasehold and cap unfair and unreasonable service and management charges. I hope that the forthcoming Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill will do so. The previous Conservative Government had its chance. Their answer was right to buy, which stripped over 1.5 million council houses from the stock since 1980. We would give councils the power to end right to buy in their areas.

The Conservatives’ other approach was Help to Buy, through which they spent £25 billion on an equity loan scheme. What did we get in return? The Institute for Fiscal Studies published research this week showing that Help to Buy made a very limited difference to affordability for first-time buyers, and the mortgage guarantee scheme only really made a difference to the maximum house price for the highest incomes. It also likely drove prices higher by fuelling a sellers’ market with extra cash. Imagine if that money had been invested in social housing instead. The Liberal Democrats do not just imagine that; our manifesto set out a commitment to 150,000 social homes per year, with an extra £6 billion per year in funding to roll them out, or £30 billion over the Parliament.

This is what we need to bring about: housing that young people can genuinely afford. In addition to social and council rental homes, we would develop a new generation of rent to own. Instead of removing the rights of local communities and councillors, we would take a different approach to secure affordable homes to buy. Our approach would prioritise essential infrastructure first, such as GPs, so that it came before new homes—no doctors, no development.

We need a different approach, and I encourage the Government to make further use of the powers that the Conservatives, to give them credit, put on the statute book, which the current Government have extended to town and parish councils, to acquire land at existing use value, and to ensure that it is raising sufficient funding from levies on development to increase the delivery of homes that young people can afford. After all, it is for our environment and communities that we want new homes to be built, and the voices of people and nature should therefore not be excluded from the process.

Young people need an affordable route out of private renting. That means a serious, funded social house building programme, including tenures specifically designed for young people, and capping rent rises in the way that we proposed during the passage of the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, so that young people can actually save—for example, for a deposit on a new home of their own.

Finally, there is another quick win sitting right in front of the Government. Lib Dem councils such as Somerset want to build more, but their borrowing is maxed out. If the Government will not increase the £3.9 billion a year for council and social housing to the £6 billion a year that we would like to see, will they look at writing off part of the decades-old housing revenue account debt? If they did so, my Liberal Democrat Somerset councillor colleagues could build at least another 630 new council houses. I would welcome further discussion with the Minister on that matter in any meeting that is granted.

Young people are not asking for much; they simply want the same chances that previous generations took for granted. They deserve a new generation of council and social rent homes—150,000 a year—and low-cost rent to own, which is an affordable route to home ownership, and that is what the Liberal Democrats in government would deliver.