Liège Declaration: Changing how the EU approaches housing policy
With the appointment of a first ever housing commissioner and new policy initiatives, the new European Commission is set to take an unprecedented interest in housing policy across its member states.
In March 2024, the European Union (EU) announced the Liège Declaration, at a conference of member states’ housing ministers in Liège, Belgium. The declaration affirmed that access to “affordable, decent, and sustainable housing for all in the European Union” is a fundamental right of EU citizens.
With recognition that housing policy will be a matter for member state governments to determine, the declaration instead calls on national governments to work towards the expansion of affordable housing by ensuring that they place more public investment into housing, that they adopt a “better governance approach”, and foster innovation between the public, private, and third sectors.
The declaration contains a call for a European new deal for affordable and social housing which, according to reports from Politico, is expected to be published by early 2025.
While details of the Commission’s new deal for housing have yet to be published, the declaration asserts that this new deal should be in line within the framework of the Commission’s Social Rights Framework Action Plan 2021-2030.
At the Liège conference, member state housing ministers called on the Commission, working with the European Parliament, European Economic and Social Committee, and the European Committee of the Regions, to organise an annual EU summit on social and affordable housing. This forum, the ministers argue, would enable stakeholders across Europe to exchange practices in compliance with the “principle of subsidiary”.
The ministers further determined that the Commission should establish an EU platform to “urgently support national, regional, and local partnership to end housing exclusion”.
Under this proposition, the Commission would strengthen its cross-sectional support for national, regional, and local policies in the housing sector by simplifying access to information on the possibilities for support from European instruments, including access to funding.
The ministers agree that the Commission must “take better account of the repercussions of EU policies on access to housing and housing exclusion in its impact assessments”.
They also assert that the European Investment Bank needs to “reinforce its support to [the] social and affordable housing sector, renewing its lending to social and affordable housing providers,” and provide advisory services to member states in order to address supply shortage.
“Ministers responsible for housing, with respect for the principle of subsidiary, call for a European new deal for affordable housing and social support to development of policies to facilitate access to affordable, decent and sustainable housing for all based on a multi-level governance and sharing best practices and experiences from different member states with the support of the European institutions,” the declaration states.
In October 2024, Politico reported that President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen intends to publish the Commission’s housing plan within the first 100 days of her new mandate.
Politico reports that a leaked draft of the document states that the EU is “suffering from a widespread housing crisis”, further specifying that rent prices and house purchase prices have seen “significant acceleration during the [Covid-19] pandemic”.
The leaked plan also reportedly contains proposals to generate funding for the Commission to support member states in their housing programmes, including guarantees from the InvestEU programme and an investment platform coordinated with the European Investment Bank. The plan also reportedly calls for measures to open up spending on retrofitting of homes for decarbonisation purposes.
