I’ll leave university with around £51,000 of student debt. I’ll be lucky to own a house by the time I’m 40. So, who should I vote for? writes Euan Trower, a 17-year-old student who lives in Coombeinteighead

‘We need to try to understand, across the different age ranges, what their real issues and concerns are.’

That was Anne Maire-Morris’s response when I asked her what she thought was the best way to engage young people in politics. Her opinion was very much that young people needed to be better engaged at a primary level, in order to encourage and entrench an attitude of participation later on.

This view was shared by Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw who thought the best way to engage young people was ‘coming to meet people at college, in schools, giving talks, answering question and obviously having policies which appeal to young people’. But, perhaps, his most telling comment was that politicians needed to ‘take young people’s issues seriously’.

There’s no doubt that there is a distinct challenge for the Conservative Party in reaching out to young people. The party has often been accused of ignoring youth issues, with Anne Marie herself admitting ‘the Conservative Party’s policies seem to be more aligned with the older voter’, and that unless young issues were taken into consideration, it would ‘be difficult for the Conservatives to win a majority’ at the next election.

The key youth policies she thought her party needed to address were ‘education, housing and the ability to get a job’, yet on the topic of education, she wouldn’t confirm or deny whether she was pro tuition fees, saying instead ‘I am pro, one looking at it, but two, coming up with a system that focuses more on the maintenance bit rather than the fees bit’.

In regards to education as a whole, she admitted ‘I don’t think we’ve got it quite right yet’.

Bradshaw also gave a vague answer around education, stating that while ‘Labour’s official policy is to abolish tuition fees, the front bench hasn’t quite spelled out how they would do that’ and confessed that as a policy, he didn’t know ‘whether that would be affordable in the short term and how it would be funded, I’m not sure’.

As an alternative, he suggested that ‘there is a strong case for reducing tuition fees back down to where they were under La­bour, which was £3,000 pounds a year’.

Both parties are rigorously targeting people either at university or planning to go. But what about those who will never go? There is now a serious need and therefore an opportunity for home-grown skilled tradesmen and women who are just as necessary as university graduates.

So, does this suggest that the policies young people demand from Westminster are simply impractical and unaffordable? Perhaps. But it could also suggest that the Conservatives and Labour still haven’t caught up with a new period in British politics in which young people feel entitled to more than previous generations. This is true in particular with the idea that it’s a basic right to own your own home and an idea that all the major parties are trying to enshrine in their manifestos.

So, with a shortage of homes, the pledge from all parties is to build more. Yet there is large scale opposition to this, especially in rural areas. Newton Abbot and its surrounding rural communities have experienced first-hand the crippling effect of large scale developments that fail to both provide social and affordable housing, the purpose for which they were supposedly built.

I put this issue of a lack of affordable homes to Anne Marie-Morris who replied: ‘The prices that new homes here are built at are not affordable’ and then later went on to state ‘these homes are not affordable, I agree with you’.

What I want to see from the major parties is responsible, properly costed policies, unlike those we’ve seen with Labour in regards to tuition fees. And on areas such as housing, I want to see a properly thought out policy with the adequate planning legislation in place to prevent large-scale developments without the necessary infrastructure swamping and destroying venerable communities like my own, unlike what we have now under the Conservatives.

Whoever can give me that can have my vote.