Eighty-six parliamentary seats may be threatened by the voting intentions of private renters, a poll by a campaign organisation has suggested today.
But one in five live in social housing – so its not just the private renters!
Inside Housing has reported today:
The poll of 1,004 private renters by Generation Rent found more than a third of them may change the political party they vote for before the next election, making them potential ‘swing voters’.
Britain’s 9 million private renters could decide 86 parliamentary seats, said Generation Rent, because the overall majority in these seats is less than the number of ‘swing voters’ that live in private rented properties in the constituency.
The research by Generation Rent proposes that 16 London seats are ‘private renter marginals’ and of the 86 seats 38 are currently Conservative, 32 are Labour and 15 are Lib Dem. The Green Party’s seat in Brighton is also threatened.
If Labour won all of the private renter swing seats it would emerge from the next election as the largest political party in the House of Commons, while if the Conservatives took the swing seats identified by the research, they would have an overall majority in 2015.
Generation Rent said this ‘should make all three parties sit up and start viewing private renters as a significant political force’. The campaign group argued it had been ‘highly cautious’ in its analysis by making calculations based on only one eligible voter per private rented household.
ComRes suggests a margin for error of around 3 per cent for the poll.