At a time when there are so many homeless people, the existence of so many empty homes is a scandal. We have campaigned successfully to provide local councils with the power to impose management orders on houses left empty for more than a year and whose owners have refused to cooperate in bringing them back into use. A Liberal Democrat government would encourage councils to make more use of such orders.

There are also large numbers of hidden homeless in the UK, people living on friends’ floors, in shared rooms, in insecure accommodation or unregistered hostels. We support a homelessness census to discover the real extent of the homelessness problem.

Liberal Democrats believe decent housing should be a right. We want to meet people’s aspirations to own their home whilst providing more social housing for rent. We aim to increase the number of affordable houses and push power down to local residents.

Liberal Democrats support new forms of low cost home ownership

Shared ownership schemes, where people partly buy and partly rent their property, are very popular but have been starved of funds by Labour. Liberal Democrats would direct more of the housing budget to shared ownership and use planning guidance to encourage more schemes. We would also promote “golden share” home ownership, where the homes remain affordable because the council or housing association can set limits on who buys them, keeping price rises down.

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