Let's Fix Politics... For Our Homes
Changing how we vote is the key to fixing our homes — and our future
By Tony Clifford-Winters
Think about the hottest day you can remember. Now imagine that is just an ordinary Tuesday in July 2040. In July 2022, temperatures hit 40.3 °C at Coningsby in Lincolnshire — the highest ever recorded in the UK — and nearly 2,800 older people died from that summer’s heat alone, according to the UK Health Security Agency and the Office for National Statistics. Then 2025 became the hottest year in records of national average temperatures dating back to 1884, at a mean of 10.09 °C, and the sunniest since records began in 1910. Our homes were not built for this. And our politics, as currently constituted, is not capable of fixing them.
A problem we already know how to solve
According to the Home Builders Federation, 78% of UK homes were built before 1980 (against an EU average of 61%). Most were designed to keep the cold out in winter. Keeping summer heat out was an afterthought, because summer heat was rare. It no longer is.
Better insulation, ventilation, shading, and heat pumps where needed can make a real difference to whether a home is liveable through a hot summer. The technology is proven, the skills exist, and the cost — shared fairly between government, energy companies, and householders — is well within reach. This is not a hard problem to understand. It is a hard problem to sustain, politically. And that is where everything falls apart.
The policy graveyard
We have tried before. The Green Deal (2013) was badly designed and dead by 2015. The Green Homes Grant launched in September 2020 with a £1.5 billion budget and ambitions to reach 600,000 homes — and was scrapped six months later, in March 2021, with 95% of the money unspent and only 49,000 vouchers ever issued. Today’s ECO4 scheme is doing some good but remains under-resourced and permanently at risk of revision.
The pattern is always the same: a programme launches with ambition, loses momentum, and gets dropped when the political weather changes. The installers give up. The homeowners give up. A new scheme is drafted. Meanwhile, the summers keep getting hotter.
First Past the Post is the problem
This is not bad luck. It is what our voting system produces, and it will keep producing it until we change the system.
Under First Past the Post, a party can walk into Downing Street with virtually unchecked power, even though most voters chose someone else. In 2024, Labour won 63% of the seats in the House of Commons on just 33.7% of the vote — the lowest share ever to deliver a majority government. In 2019, the Conservatives took 56% of the seats on 43.6% of the vote. Two elections, two massive majorities, two governments with the power to do whatever they liked — and, predictably, each one spent a good deal of its energy tearing up what the last one had built.
Adapting to climate change through better-insulated homes is not a five-year project. It needs a decade or more of steady investment in supply chains, trained installers, and street-by-street delivery. Under our current system, it will never get that decade. Every few years the electoral pendulum swings, a new government arrives with a mandate it has largely invented, and the work starts again from scratch.
The climate does not do electoral cycles. A home built in 1930 will still be standing in 2060. We cannot keep treating a 30-year problem as though it can wait until after the next election.
The Liberal Democrats’ answer: proportional representation
The Liberal Democrats have long championed the Single Transferable Vote: a system of proportional representation that gives every voter a genuine choice, makes votes count right across the country, and produces governments that almost always need to work with other parties rather than simply outvoting them.
This matters enormously for long-term policy. Under STV, no party can win a commanding majority on a third of the vote and immediately set about dismantling what came before. Governments have to negotiate. They have to compromise. They have to think about the next decade, not just the next election, because the support they need to govern depends on it. That is not a weakness. It is exactly the kind of discipline that a challenge like climate change demands.
The evidence from comparable democracies is compelling. Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and New Zealand all use proportional systems. None of them is paralysed. All of them are, by most measures, better governed and more trusted by their citizens than Britain currently is. And all of them are considerably further ahead on energy efficiency, home retrofit, and climate adaptation. When governments are built on broad coalitions rather than statistical accidents, the policies they produce tend to be broader, more durable, and more effective.
Proportional representation would not, on its own, guarantee a coherent retrofit programme. But without it, no such programme can survive long enough to work. It is the foundation on which everything else has to be built.
Completing the picture
Electoral reform is the central lever, but it is not the only one. A second chamber stuffed with more than 800 political appointees, none of them elected, is no substitute for a body with a genuine democratic mandate to hold governments to their long-term commitments. Countries that bring ordinary citizens into the process of shaping difficult policy — as Ireland did so effectively on climate — produce decisions that are harder to reverse, because the public genuinely owns them. And the work of retrofitting homes cannot be managed from Whitehall: it is street-by-street, house-by-house work that needs real power and real resources in local hands.
Each of these is a necessary part of the democratic reform that serious climate action requires. But none of them amounts to anything without first fixing the broken voting system that sits at the root of the UK’s inability to sustain long-term policy of any kind.
Fix the voting system. Fix the homes
Next summer will be hotter than average. Someone in the UK will die in a home that could have been made safe, if only a retrofit programme had been allowed to run for long enough to reach it — not because the technology failed, and not because the money was not there, but because our political system keeps pulling the rug out from under every serious attempt to act.
Changing how we vote is not an abstract constitutional argument. It is the most practical thing we can do to adapt to a changing climate. It is how we build governments that are forced to think in decades rather than parliamentary terms. It is how we stop the cycle of launch, stumble, and scrap that has defined energy policy for 30 years.
We know what our homes need. We know what the climate demands. What we have lacked, year after year, is a political system capable of delivering it. The Liberal Democrats are committed to providing one — starting with the vote.
Tony Clifford-Winters is a councillor on Newent Town Council, chair of the Council's Climate Change Action Working Group and chair of the Council’s Policy Committee, but is writing in a personal capacity.
Sources
Met Office. 2025 is double-record breaker: UK’s warmest and sunniest year on record (2 January 2026).
UKHSA/Office for National Statistics. Excess mortality during heat-periods: England and Wales, June–August 2022 (October 2022).
Home Builders Federation. Housing horizons: examining UK housing stock in an international context (2023).
House of Commons Library. Green homes grant (Research Briefing CBP-10797, 2021).
House of Commons Library. General election 2024 results and analysis (CBP-10009, September 2024).
House of Commons Library. General election 2019: results and analysis (CBP-8749, 28 January 2020).
Citizens’ Assembly of Ireland. Third report and recommendations on climate change (April 2018).
Statista. UK House of Lords composition (2026).
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Liberal Democrats for Electoral Reform welcome contributions from a range of voices and perspectives. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and should not be taken as the official position of LDER, the Liberal Democrats or any affiliated organisation.