Verdicts · Housing
What the UK thinks about housing
Settled referendums
37
since Jun 2026
Votes cast
4,753
all time, on housing
This week
955
votes · 2 referendums settled
Written opinions
171
all time, left by voters
This week's opinion highlightThe most respected opinion this week
“Yes, absolutely. Look at the pricing of rent. Labour have managed to reduce the number of landlords, thus giving the surviving landlords more control and power. The more government gets involved with stuff, the worse it gets.”
Lixhul, debating Yes on “Will the Renters' Rights Act end up hurting the tenants it was meant to help?” · read the thread →
8
Respects
Most respected on housing this week
- 1.JohnnyBoy5 respects
- 2.BenL5 respects
- 3.SpencerBullard5 respects
- 4.DavidSandilands3 respects
- 5.jezwootton3 respects
Who answered this week
The 512 placed voters lean Centre Right overall.
H. Left4%
Left18%
C. Left7%
Centre6%
C. Right12%
Right46%
H. Right7%
Regions this week
South EastC. Right
LondonCentre
South WestC. Right
ScotlandC. Right
North WestRight
YorkshireC. Right
East of EnglandCentre
West MidlandsC. Right
East MidlandsCentre
North EastC. Right
WalesC. Right
Northern IrelandRight
Votes each week
955so far this week
29127 Jul
5763 Aug
36910 Aug
26317 Aug
37924 Aug
95531 Aug
All-time housing highlights
Biggest landslide
YES 80%
Should the government limit repeated judicial reviews and set court timetables to speed up major housing and infrastructure projects?
80% of 83 votes went the same way.
Closest result
NO 51%
Should the government introduce Spatial Development Strategies to set 20-30 year growth frameworks above local plans?
Decided by 1 vote.
Most debated
YES 61%
Will the Renters' Rights Act end up hurting the tenants it was meant to help?
24 written opinions.
This week
2 settled · 955 votes
0% YES
Majority for
NO 23%
473 votes
0 skipped
by @BenL⏱ Ended 31 Aug 2026
Should ground rents on all existing leasehold properties be capped at a peppercorn (£0)?
The verdict
“Archaic, quasi-feudal system” was the winning diagnosis: the room backed peppercorn ground rents by more than two to one, while the No side sounded more divided than defeated.
0% YES
Majority for
NO 39%
482 votes
0 skipped
by @refnation⏱ Ended 31 Aug 2026
Will the Renters' Rights Act end up hurting the tenants it was meant to help?
The verdict
“The people who will buy those homes will not be the same people struggling at the bottom of the renting pile,” one voter warned. The Act’s critics carried the room by two to one, with supply and rising rents outweighing the promise of security.
Last week
1 settled · 379 votes
0% NO
Majority against
YES 43%
379 votes
0 skipped
by @AlexHolstead⏱ Ended 26 Aug 2026
Should air conditioning be mandatory in all newly built homes?
The verdict
The floor’s most respected case was for building homes fit for a hotter climate from the start; voters nevertheless rejected a mandate, with No winning by 216 votes to 163.
Every housing verdict
- YES 77%Should ground rents on all existing leasehold properties be capped at a peppercorn (£0)?“Archaic, quasi-feudal system” was the winning diagnosis: the room backed peppercorn ground rents by more than two to one, while the No side sounded more divided than defeated.
- YES 61%Will the Renters' Rights Act end up hurting the tenants it was meant to help?“The people who will buy those homes will not be the same people struggling at the bottom of the renting pile,” one voter warned. The Act’s critics carried the room by two to one, with supply and rising rents outweighing the promise of security.
- NO 57%Should air conditioning be mandatory in all newly built homes?The floor’s most respected case was for building homes fit for a hotter climate from the start; voters nevertheless rejected a mandate, with No winning by 216 votes to 163.
- YES 76%Is the decline in home ownership in England since 2003 a serious problem?A generation priced out of ownership made this a vote about belonging, with “a stake in their own nation” the sharpest line in a decisive Yes vote.
- YES 71%Should Indian citizens be prevented from buying property in Britain until India allows reciprocal purchases by Britons?The floor treated reciprocity as a doorway to a broader property ban: Yes won by more than two to one, while the sharpest No objection was that India had been singled out.
- YES 58%Should the Government embark on a massive programme of building council homes similar to post-Second World War?A clear Yes win exposed a debate less about council homes than about who should own them: the floor’s best-rated proposal was a Singapore-style system of public housing sold at cost, not a return to the old model.
- NO 54%Should the government regulate private rents in England?No prevailed narrowly, but the losing side supplied the room’s most vivid warning: “There is no way anybody will ever buy a house again” while renters keep paying landlords’ mortgages.
- YES 54%Should developers be required to offer new-build homes under £500k only to first-time buyers for the first 6-12 months?A narrow win for intervention, this one, but the chamber's sharpest thinking lived almost entirely on the losing side, with No voters doing the analytical heavy lifting while Yes carried the vote on sentiment alone.
- YES 62%Should the government make it easier for developers to build houses and infrastructure?Two to one in favour of easier planning for homes and infrastructure, yet the debate that actually happened barely touched planning law at all — it was a proxy fight about immigration, with the most-respected voice on either side making that case rather than the one in the question.
- NO 72%Does allocating £92,300 per local authority from the Development Management Fund help speed up UK housing delivery?Nearly three to one, the chamber dismissed the £92,300 grant as a rounding error against council budgets running into hundreds of millions, with even the sole Yes voice conceding the sum was "no where near enough" to undo fourteen years of cuts.
- NO 71%Is Angela Rayner's 1.5 million homes target realistic given worsening market conditions?The floor delivered a rout rather than a technical verdict: with fewer than three in ten voters calling the 1.5 million target realistic, this landed less as a judgment on planning delays or borrowing costs than as a referendum on Labour's competence and on immigration, the issues that dominated the No case.
- YES 70%Should landlords of student lets pay council tax on the property?A clear two-to-one margin for taxing student landlords, but the sharpest No argument barely dented the result: this was a vote decided on who should bear the cost of student living, not on the technicalities of who legally owes it.
- YES 59%Should the UK government promote structural timber to accelerate housebuilding?A modest majority here backed timber over steel and concrete as the fix for Britain's housing shortfall, with yes carrying it by eighteen points even as the middle-aged proved the coalition's soft spot.
- NO 76%Is Labour's 1.5 million homes target realistic?Scepticism ran deep across the chamber on Labour's flagship housebuilding pledge, with roughly three in four voters here dismissing the 1.5 million target as unrealistic even as annual completions sit at their lowest since 2015/16.
- YES 67%Should Stamp Duty Land Tax be abolished for Pensioners wishing to downsize to smaller property?Two to one in favour of scrapping the tax for downsizing pensioners, but the chamber's enthusiasm peaked not among the retired themselves but among those eyeing retirement — with the 55-64s and 45-54s the most persuaded of all, while the youngest and the 35-44 cohort were essentially split down the middle.
- YES 60%Should England introduce rent controls linked to CPI and wage growth?Renters' economics collided with landlords' instincts as the chamber backed tying rent rises to inflation and wages by a clear if not overwhelming margin, its 60% Yes handing England the kind of statutory rent regime Scotland has run for a decade.
- NO 73%Should we be allowing the building of new housing on arable farmland and greenbelt?Voters here drew a hard line under the countryside, rejecting greenbelt and farmland development by nearly three to one, with only the youngest working-age cohort showing any real appetite for building on protected land.
- YES 71%Should the government require buybacks of unsellable shared ownership homes to protect affordable housing stock?There is a striking uniformity to this one: whatever the age bracket, roughly seven in ten voters backed compelling government buybacks of unsellable shared ownership homes, a rare instance of consensus cutting clean across the generational lines that usually split housing votes.
- NO 53%Should Andy Burnham launch the biggest council housebuilding programme since the post-war period?A single vote separated the two camps, which is the real finding here — a chamber almost perfectly split on whether the state should once again become Britain's biggest housebuilder, with No edging it by the narrowest of margins.
- YES 54%Should the government release grey belt land in the green belt for housebuilding?A narrow win for Labour's grey belt strategy, with the chamber splitting almost along gender lines as much as any planning logic, as voters backed releasing lower-quality green belt for housing by a slim margin.
Show all 37 verdicts ↓
- YES 67%Should the government extend judicial review reforms to major housing, transport and energy projects?The chamber backed loosening judicial review's grip on housebuilding and infrastructure by two to one, but the enthusiasm belonged almost entirely to the working-age middle — a generation used to blaming planning delay for Britain's stalled growth, not to the young or the old.
- YES 71%Should it be a requirement that all new houses built include solar and storage?On mandating solar and storage in every new build, the chamber reached rare cross-generational agreement, with roughly seven in ten backing the requirement and only the 35-44 bracket showing any real wobble.
- YES 80%Should the government limit repeated judicial reviews and set court timetables to speed up major housing and infrastructure projects?This vote reads less like a fight over judicial review than an exasperated shrug at planning delay: four in five voters, across nearly every age band, said get on with it.
- YES 55%Should the new Prime Minister immediately confirm Strategic Partnership bids and top up social housing funding?Housing bids squeaked through rather than sailed, with a narrow majority for immediate confirmation exposing a chamber more divided by age and sex than by any settled view on housing policy itself.
- YES 60%Should the government redirect major housing investment to expand council-owned homes?Three in five voters backed rerouting Britain's housing billions into council ownership, but the chamber's men and women read the plan in almost mirror opposite ways — a nearly two-to-one gender gulf that the topline hides entirely.
- NO 53%Should the UK create a Cabinet-level body to oversee new towns delivery?A near-even split on paper resolved into a narrow No, with the chamber's scepticism about new machinery outweighing the case for central grip on the new-towns programme.
- NO 54%Should the UK create a state-owned housebuilder to support construction during market downturns?A near-even split settled narrowly against Whitehall building homes itself, with the closest thing to a consensus coming from the 35-44s, prime-mortgage-age voters who rejected the idea most firmly of all.
- YES 56%Could rent controls improve affordability in England's private rental sector?A modest yes conceals a chamber that could barely agree with itself: strip out the two ends of the age range and the middle years split almost precisely down the middle on whether rent controls would help.
- YES 56%Should England require neighbouring councils to prepare joint spatial development strategies for housing, jobs and transport?A dip in the middle of the age range, not the ends, decided this: the 35-54s—presumably the ones actually navigating local plans and school catchments—turned against joint strategies that voters either side of them, younger and older, waved through, as England backed mandatory cross-council planning 56-44.
- NO 51%Should the government introduce Spatial Development Strategies to set 20-30 year growth frameworks above local plans?A near-perfect tie on planning reform ended in NO by a single vote, but the real split was generational: every under-25 backed the strategies, while 35-44s rejected them almost nine to one.
- NO 51%Should the government extend the Decent Homes Standard to all privately owned homes?A single vote settled it — one of 59 — leaving the extension of the Decent Homes Standard into owner-occupied Britain narrowly rejected, with the sharpest divide running not between renters and owners but between the middle-aged and everyone else.
- NO 54%Should the government introduce rent controls to improve housing affordability?A room convened to champion tenants' rights split into a narrow No on rent controls, with the middle-aged and middle-class-adjacent 35-54 bracket doing most of the rejecting while women backed the policy by more than two to one.
- YES 65%Should the government relax planning rules to build 300,000 homes a year in England?Beneath the comfortable two-to-one win for looser planning rules sits a straightforward generational fault line: almost every voter under 55 backed building, while the 55-64s turned against it nine to two.
- YES 61%Should the UK government launch a national housebuilding programme focused on social rented homes?The clearest split here is not old versus young but the 35-44s marooned against everyone else: a solid national YES for a state housebuilding drive on social rented homes, carried by 45-54s voting unanimously and mid-career families alone dissenting.
- YES 70%Should the UK implement an annual property tax (removing stamp duty and council tax)?Yes carried the chamber 21-9, but the real story is the 25-34 bloc, which supplied half the vote and backed reform 12-3, while 35-44-year-olds broke sharply the other way.
- YES 65%Should Cambridge introduce stricter planning controls on houses in multiple occupation?Yes to stricter HMO controls carried Cambridge 65-35, but the only age group large enough to matter split almost evenly against consensus: 25-34s voted 45% yes, the sole bloc to lean No.
- NO 58%Should the government create a national construction materials strategy for new towns?A modest but clear defeat for the idea of a national construction materials strategy, with No winning by 16 points on 33 votes — and a gender gap wider than any age divide, men splitting evenly while women rejected it by more than three to one.