GENERAL Election pledges on housing have been called into question by the UK's leading professional bodies for estate agents and letting agents.

As the country prepares to vote on Thursday, June 8, party leaders have been outlining their manifesto plans to make homes more plentiful and affordable.

However, Mark Hayward, chief executive of NAEA Propertymark, and David Cox, chief executive of ARLA Propertymark, have released a joint statement which questions how realistic the Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem policies are.

They say: "Only 32,000 affordable homes were built in 2016, which hasn’t made a dent; although the parties are pledging to build hundreds of thousands of new homes, we need to seriously consider if such pledges are even remotely practically possible.

"As we have said many times, we need to take the politics out of housing and consider other ways to ease the pressure on housebuilding that will allow us to provide a more accessible and affordable housing market for all."

Describing the housing market as "in crisis", they say: "We are simply not building enough homes to meet the demand from both the private rented and sales sectors. We are concerned that housing has become a political football for future governments to score points against each other and this is getting in the way of actually ensuring we have the right sort of houses available, in the right areas, across all tenures, to provide the homes that people need."

The Lib Dems, in their manifesto, say Britain's housing crisis has become "an emergency" and the party has set "an ambitious target of increasing the rate of housebuilding to 300,000 a year - almost double the current level".

The party is pledging to create at least ten new Garden Cities in England, providing tens of thousands of "high-quality new zero carbon homes, with gardens and shared green space".

The Tories say they will meet their commitment to "deliver a million homes by the end of 2020", plus 500,000 by the end of 2022.

The party says the focus will be on high-quality, high-density housing such as mews and terraces, and it will uphold the protected status of green belt land, national parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Labour plans to create a new Department for Housing to tackle "a crisis of supply and a crisis of affordability" and it will invest to build more than a million new homes.

Brownfield sites will be prioritised, says the manifesto, and work will start on New Towns to prevent urban sprawl.

The party says it will build thousands more low-cost homes reserved for first-time buyers, as the number of home-owning households has fallen by 900,000 for under-45s since 2010.

The Green Party, meanwhile, is pledging a major push on affordable-home building, including 500,000 new social rented homes over five years. It also wants to bring empty dwellings back into use.