If you set out to build an institution that represented the interests of renters and first-time buyers, you could hardly do worse than our House of Commons. The vast majority of our 648 MPs owns at least one house. Almost a third own and let out a second home, own a property company, or are beneficiaries of property-owning trusts. They have benefitted directly from the decades-long failure of the UK housing market.
This blog looks at how the second homes and property interests owned by MPs influences how they vote in the ongoing Conservative Party Leadership elections. We downloaded the full dataset of MP interests, including property, provided by TheyWorkForYou. Crunching the numbers and comparing to the spreadsheet of Tory nominations maintained by Election Maps showed how, even in the upper echelons of our political system, housing wealth determines success.
If you want to be the Conservative Party Leader, it helps to be a landlord. Of the twelve people currently running[1] , six (50%) own a second home or property company. This is high even by Tory standards – 35% of the parliamentary party own a second home. Jeremy Hunt leads the pack (if only in this regard), with an eye-watering nine properties across London, Southampton, and Italy.
Moreover – at least among MPs – property owners are proving more popular. They have an average of 18 nominations each, while MPs without any property wealth have just 12 nominations. It’s interesting to note, however, that the Conservative Party members may disagree; neither of their top two candidates[FP1] , Penny Mordaunt or Kemi Badenoch, own houses.
The Conservative Party’s landlords look out for their own. Among MPs who own houses themselves, 69% have nominated another landlord as their choice for party leader. Among MPs who don’t own houses, only 54% have nominated a landlord. The front-runner, Rishi Sunak, is relatively popular among landlords, with 43% of his supporters owning property. For Penny Mordaunt, who has the second most nominations, only 28% of her supporters are landlords.
As this was written, only 190 Conservative MPs had declared – so there’s plenty of room for these statistics to change over the next week. Follow PricedOut for updates.