Housing Needs: Young People

Sean Woodcock Excerpts

Thursday 16th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sean Woodcock (Banbury) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today, Ms Butler. When I first stood for election to this place, I did so with a mission to fix Oxfordshire’s broken housing market. I saw the mess that we were in. I saw the lives broken by that market long before I arrived here.

Oxford faces a crisis of unique and crushing proportions. Homes now cost 12 times local earnings—a burden for the city, a burden for the county and a burden that no other part of this country is asked to bear.

For our young people, the situation is transformative in the worst of ways. Those aged 25 to 34 are now the backbone of a private rented sector that has doubled in size since the start of the century. These young people are renters by necessity, renters without equity and renters without a clear path to a home of their own.

In Oxford, nearly a third of households rent privately. As the city’s prices climb, the pressure climbs; as the pressure climbs, people leave. They leave and go to places such as Banbury. They come for the 20-minute commute, but they bring with them the weight of Oxford’s exhaustion. Thus Oxford’s housing problems become Banbury’s housing problems. Demand has surged. Supply has stalled. My inbox swells as the local housing waiting list ticks up and up, quadrupling in a single decade.

This is what I say to the local voices who question why Cherwell district council, which covers Banbury, must contribute to Oxford’s unmet housing need: “It is no longer Oxford’s need. It is our need in Banbury as well. It is our future. It is our children who are being priced out of their own parishes.”

Let us be clear: this is not merely a housing crisis. It is an economic crisis. Oxford does not just grow; it prospers. It does not just work; it innovates. Our high-tech industries generate £23.5 billion in gross value added annually. We are a net contributor to the Exchequer, a global destination for talent and a titan of enterprise. That is why the Chancellor is right to champion the Oxford-Cambridge corridor—it is a vision of growth, infrastructure and national renewal—but that vision will remain a mirage if the workers required to build it cannot afford to live within it.

By failing to build, we are stifling the growth we seek, the talent we nurture and the very future we promised to deliver. I therefore urge the Government to give young people in Banbury and across Oxfordshire the tools, the support and the resolve that we need to help me to keep my promise of helping to fix Oxfordshire’s broken housing market.