Take it from someone homeless, cutting stamp duty will improve lives
The Conservatives will make homeownership easier, but we must make it easier to build too, says Laurence Fredricks
I am a senior researcher at Onward, leading our work on housing policy, and a Policy Fellow at Conservative YIMBY. But as a consequence of London’s housing affordability and availability problem, I am also homeless.
Months of searching has produced nothing. Offers hundreds of pounds over the asking price have been rejected. I’ve been ghosted by estate agents and crammed into viewings with 12 others at a time, all competing for a single, overpriced flat. It’s exhausting, repetitive and ultimately indicative of a system that does not work. The outcome is that I am now sofa surfing. And I am not alone in this; there are an estimated 12,500 ‘hidden homeless’ people like myself in London every night. Quite simply, when there are too few homes, you end up with homeless people.
But Kemi Badenoch’s closing speech at Conservative Party Conference was a glimmer of hope. The abolition of stamp duty is a welcome leap in the right direction for housing. It is clear that the Conservative Party is listening to, and starting to deliver, what it must for aspirational voters.
Scrapping stamp duty should make transactions cheaper and easier, freeing up capital as new homes are sold and old homes change hands. That fluidity encourages movement in the market, giving developers the confidence to deliver. When people can buy, developers will build. And when developers build, more people can access homes, whether that is to own or to rent.
Restoring confidence
This confidence is desperately needed. In the first half of 2025, only 3,950 new homes were sold, echoing the depths of the 2009 recession. In May 2025, just 19 new homes were sold in London, a disgraceful number in a city of nine million. Unsurprisingly, construction has stalled. There were just 2,158 private housing starts in the first half of this year, against an annual target of 88,000 homes. This means in future, to deliver the homes we need in London, the target will have to become ever more ambitious.
But as Badenoch rightly said: “We must go further. We must free up our housing market”. And we therefore cannot stop at this win for economic sensibility and progress on the housing crisis. Restoring confidence for developers via stamp duty abolition will not be enough – we must also tackle the ruinous regulatory requirements that squander delivery in London.
The Building Safety Regulator exemplifies this exact problem. This quango must approve all tall buildings, a natural form of growth in a dense city. But the regulator has become a bottleneck. Around 70 per cent of applications are rejected, suggesting absurd stringency. This means the backlog grows and more people become locked out of housing availability, be it to rent or to own.
Then there are the design mandates that chip away at density. The second staircase requirement, introduced with good intentions, destroys viable schemes. Dual-aspect rules, demanding windows on both sides of flats reduce the number of homes per block. Each seemingly small change adds cost, delays delivery and drives down the total number of homes that ever make it off the drawing board.
Even minimum space standards, which dictate how big a home must be, form an obstacle to choice. For co-living and purpose-built student accommodation, there are limited exemptions, but for most Londoners, these rules force us to buy or rent more space than we can afford. Why should we not be free to trade off size for affordability? A 25-year-old moving to London for a new job may happily choose a smaller home at a lower rent they can afford, if only the market were allowed to provide it, rather than, as I have had to start doing – sleeping on sofas.
London’s housing market is often described as broken. But it’s more accurate to say it is being strangled. Luckily, it is not dead yet. The described, non-exhaustive diagnosis of red tape ensures less delivery, less density, and, to be frank, more homelessness in London. In practice, it has made it impossible for many to build and to live here at all.
If Badenoch’s encouraging reform proposals are to gain full confidence in the Party, they must go beyond stimulating demand. The next step must be liberating supply: streamlining approvals for tall buildings, scaling back the regulator’s veto power, relaxing minimum standards, and restoring flexibility to the system.