Current Conservative housing policy emerged rather later than their other policies. In Breakdown Britain (Social Justice Policy Group, 2006), for example, which proposed new policies for families, education, debt management, tackling poverty and substance misuse, and promoting the third sector, there was no mention of housing at all. Housing policy, did, however, appear in Breakthrough Britain (Social Justice Policy Group, 2007), and we can see this as the embryo of the housing policy that followed. However, Conservative housing policy has continued to be overshadowed by wider debates about welfare reform and the so-called ‘Big Society’ and the relationship of housing to these debates is not entirely clear.

The genesis of Conservative housing policy

At first, the Conservatives’ approach to housing policy was distinguished by an emphasis on family. On this, Breakthrough Britain (Social Justice Policy Group, 2007) made four recommendations:

• • To create asset-owning families through extensions of the right to buy, rent-to-own and shared equity schemes, with the aim being ‘for all social housing tenants to be able to build up capital within (and ultimately be able to purchase) the property they occupy’.

• • To reform housing benefit so that it ‘could move from being arrearsbased to credit-based’, with the implication being that the benefit being paid to tenants could be capitalised in order to enable tenants to acquire assets such as housing.

• • To make it easier for social housing tenants to move, through ‘a more flexible tenancy arrangement which takes changes in circumstances into account’. The text here gives the example of families who are under-occupying because their children have ‘flown the nest’, so the implication appears to be that it is changes in family circumstances that the Conservatives have in mind.

• • To help vulnerable families move towards self-sufficiency through increasing the provision of supported housing projects.

These recommendations suggested a general policy approach of capitalising lower-income families, increasing their residential mobility and enabling them to improve the management of their own housing circumstances. Of these, however, it is only the idea of flexible tenancies that has been taken forward into policy.

By the time of the publication of the Centre for Social Justice’s (2008b) report on Housing Poverty, thinking within the Conservative Party had moved on considerably.