Prospective MP for the Cities of London & Westminster, Tim Barnes, explains the housing challenge facing central London.
"Housing is one of the most important issues that people contact me about in the case workload in the email inbox that I receive, as well as one of the things that we talk about most in the popular media, online, in print, or broadcast.
"Much of the debate comes down to how many houses we've been building. The truth is that housing as an issue is much more complicated than that.
"There are issues to do with leasehold reform. There are issues to do with how people obtain mortgages.
"But at the heart of it is this target for what we build. And looking at the manifestos for both of the main parties, there's an awful lot in there about what the commitments might be to build.
"And I just want to reflect on that with you today.
"In the Conservative Party manifesto, we have a commitment to build 1.6 million new homes in the next Parliament. And you can have some confidence in that because we promised to build a million in the last Parliament. And we hit those numbers.
"By contrast, the Labour Party is promising to build 1.5 million. It's a similar number, but not quite as ambitious.
"And their model for who they are saying, you know, they're going to build so much of their agenda on is Keir Starmer's favourite mayor, Sadiq Khan, right here in London."Now many of us have reservations about him in the first place, but so too did the UK Statistics Authority, who wrote back to say that some of his comments on his housebuilding achievements were in fact misleading, and that he was talking about starts when, in actual fact, he'd claimed it was really about completed houses.
"So we know that Labour's ambition is less than ours and their track record of delivery isn't as good.
"So why go for less ambitious and less likely?
"Go for the ambitious, positive target the Conservatives are putting forward with a track record of delivery.
"Vote for me on Thursday 4 July and I will ensure that we get the quantity and the type of housing that we need, particularly those family homes here in the Cities of London and Westminster."
