An analysis of seven party manifestos reveals little to get excited about when it comes to proposals for tackling empty homes.
The comparison of the policies in the manifestos, details of which can be found in our "Manifesto-Meter", took the five key points in the Empty Homes Network's Filling the Empties policy position paper as the benchmark against which the various manifestos were evaluated. Up to five stars were available in each category depending how closely the party proposals matched our own suggested policies, and taking into account the relative importance of the individual proposals overall.
Given the understandably restricted amount of detail to be found in the manifestos, the evaluation took other sources of policy into account, such as recent policy statements by senior politicians (eg Labour's commitment to abolishing New Homes Bonus), or reasonable inferences from other policies (eg trickle-down effects from significantly increased capital spending on affordable homes), and shows these as lighter-coloured stars.
The analysis mostly focuses on positive. practical proposals, but does also look take into account proposals that might be considered negative: Labour earns itself the only (light) red stars for its proposal (not contained in the manifesto) to abolish New Homes Bonus without any suggestions as to what might take its place as an accepted incentive for local authorities to tackle empty homes in their areas.
The Manifesto-Meter is expected to attract attention from around the world, heralding a new breakthrough in cosmology (and one which, incidentally, has been achieved much more cheaply than CERN's Large Hadron Collider): the star-chart (see below) provides compelling evidence that the mysterious dark matter being sought by astro-physicists actually consists of missing policies on empty homes.
