"Yimby's" or "Nimby's" – All political parties are getting housing wrong.

Sir Kier Starmer, the leader of the opposition, last week launched a war on nimbyism, short for "not in my back yard", targeting voters who want more housing. Sir Kier Starmer is a self-proclaimed Yimby. "Yes, in my backyard". Analysis suggests that people in Labour's most winnable seats are pro-development, making the issue key to the party's election ambitions. Labour has already committed itself to building 1.5 million more homes within the first five years of taking office and wants to develop the "grey belt land" areas, which are classified as green belt land but include disused car parks or wasteland.

Last week, the Green Party also launched its campaign for the local election by making housing the front and centre of its policy. The Greens pledging more affordable homes will be built in Bristol if the Greens were to win the local election. Carla Denyer, the National Green Party co-leader, said, "The country faces an acute housing crisis". There are over a million people on the waiting list for council housing. In England, the average home for sale now costs more than eight times the average annual household income.

On the other hand, the Conservative party has been scrambling to pass the Renters Reform Bill and the Leasehold and Freehold Bill legislation to showcase to the voters that it is serious about implementing effective change within the housing sector. Whether you agree with these reforms or not is a separate debate. But all political parties are squaring their ducks in a row to differentiate themselves on housing policy for the upcoming general election this year.

Housing in the UK has always been a key issue during the General Election. However, the shift brought about by the pandemic, with more people working from home, and the big boost in house prices since 2020 will make it even more front and centre at this year's general election.

It's more about big announcements rather than tackling the real issues:

All parties have different opinions about regulation, the market, the role of developers, and even, to an extent, the point of housing, which is why housing policy is always challenging to understand. Most housing policies are more about the big announcements and very thin on details of how a particular party would achieve these reforms. The minute you have a headline-grabbing policy announcement on housing, the party opposite is ready to critique the policy by not offering meaningful solutions but by scaremongering.

For instance, Labour's new pledge to build more homes on Green Belts includes changes to how green belt land can be released for development. It is very good for headline-grabbing but very thin on details of how they would achieve this, but the Conservatives were quick to accuse Labour of "tarmacing over" the green belt.

Most parties are entangling themselves into ideological policies that sound good to the electorate but will make very little impact on resolving the issue, and the media is very quick to jump onto this political bandwagon. For instance, over 60% of the UK population oppose homes built on green belts, and 7 in 10 of those who oppose homes built on green belts cannot identify whether the land was green belts. However, the conservatives coming out and accusing Labour of tarmacking over the green belts will be very effective because 60% of the population opposes building on the green belt even though 70% can't even identify the green belt land.

Labour's pledge to build more homes on green belt land is sensible if implemented correctly, but more practical issues must be addressed before promising to build more homes. While the promise to build more might get you national headlines as a party, there is little practical detail or industry analysis of how this would be achieved. Is that because giving a detailed plan would mean coming to terms with reality? And having to tell voters to build 1.5 million homes in five years is a fallacy.

Labour Party's pledge to build more homes on green belts goes into no detail about how they would address the construction workers shortages; industry experts predict that 266,000 more construction workers will be needed by 2026 just to sustain the existing levels of homes being built each year. The Labour plan does not even mention the shortage of construction workers.

Their plans to build on green belts will require significant planning reform. The challenge is that since 2010, local authority planning resources have halved. If Labour is serious about planning reforms, it needs to invest in local authority planning resources, but again, there is no mention of planning reform.

This is where the issue lies; political parties are targeting voters' sentiments on housing and making announcements which are practically impossible to achieve without meaningful reform. The last eight years have seen the decimation of the private rental sector, where demand has grown exponentially, but investment has been stagnant. As a result, rent has risen to a record high, and those who pay the price are the renters. This is what ideological policies which are ill-informed and just made to grab headlines achieve: more pain for the average buyer or renter. Unless a political party talks about the serious shortfalls of the sector and encourages investment through meaningful reform, housing policy in the UK will never make effective changes to ordinary people's lives; if anything, it is bound to make it worse.