Kevin Hollinrake MP
DesignationShadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
There’s an old saying: If we don’t welcome young people into the village, they’ll burn it down just to feel its warmth. I think about that often when I remember being in my mid-twenties, financially struggling but still believing I could own a home one day.
Not just a roof over my head, but a chance to build capital, to invest in my future and create something lasting. That hope, that sense of possibility, is what we must preserve for every young person in Britain today.
As Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, this is not just part of my brief, it is central to all I do. Today’s housing crisis risks crushing that hope entirely.
A generation is being locked out of ownership, priced out of opportunity and excluded from their own communities. We cannot allow that to happen.
The Conservative Party has always championed home ownership. Not because it polls well, but because it embodies our deepest values.
Owning your own home means security and stability. It means having a voice in your community. It means being invested in your street, your town and your country.
It means building the kind of society where success and responsibility go hand in hand. We do not apologise for believing in that. We do not apologise for wanting to extend it.
That belief is backed by delivery. During our time in Government, we added an average of 207,000 homes per year to housing stock for a decade.
That was the highest rate for 50 years. We helped more than one million young people buy a home through Stamp Duty discounts, Help to Buy and Right to Buy. All now effectively scrapped by Labour.
Labour’s record is already unravelling. Housing starts are falling. First-time buyers have been abandoned. There is no support scheme in place for them at all for the first time in recent memory.
In London, where Labour has had nearly a decade in control, 23 out of 33 boroughs recorded no new housing starts in the first quarter 2025. Sadiq Khan’s London is a warning, not a model.
The National Planning Policy Framework shifts burdens from the cities to the countryside, placing unreasonable demands on rural areas while urban mayors are let off the hook.
It also removes key protections in the Green Belt and threatens to unravel the settlement that has for decades protected our towns and villages from urban sprawl.
The Planning and infrastructure Bill’s “National Scheme of Delegation” deliberately silences councillors voices who might have considered objecting to individual applications.
We cannot discuss housing without acknowledging who we’re building for. Current immigration levels place unsustainable pressure on housing supply.
Analysis from Onward shows net immigration alone adds £132 monthly to average rents in England. In London that figure rises to £216.
This isn’t marginal. It is driving young families from cities and pricing working people from their communities.
Meanwhile, the social housing system is straining under unprecedented demand. Too often British-born citizens who have paid into the system their whole lives are left waiting while recent arrivals including many with illegitimate asylum claims are placed ahead of them.
This is not compassionate. It is unjust. It erodes confidence in the very concept of a social safety net and breeds resentment that no society can sustain.
We must tell the truth. Housing cannot be fixed without immigration reform. If you keep adding demand without control the result will always be unaffordable and inadequate.
A fair system starts by putting British citizens first. It continues by building more homes in places where people want to live, not just where it is politically easiest to dump a quota and it means ensuring every new home is backed by the schools, GPs, shops and services that make a neighbourhood liveable.
You cannot impose houses on people. You must build communities with them.
This is the Conservative approach. We believe in building, but we also believe in beauty, fairness and consent. Identikit houses that are completely out of keeping with the local areas are not the way forward.
Nor do we believe the solution is to bulldoze fields while ignoring cities. We do not believe that planning is a problem to be eliminated but improved.
The Conservative Party has a plan. Through the Policy Renewal Programme we are looking at how to support first time buyers and ending the abuse of social housing by foreign nationals.
We will cut legal immigration, deport illegal immigrants and foreign national offenders. We will cut red tape and speed up planning. We will empower local communities, not override them. We will build homes with character, not just units of accommodation.
The question isn’t whether we need to build, but how we build and for whom. The Conservative way ensures that young people today can have the same hope I had in my twenties.
The hope of a home, a stake in society, a voice in their community and a place in the village. That is the Britain we will build.
Featured image via Shutterstock.
