UK
How a Labour Government could solve the Housing Crisis
The Labour Campaign for Council Housing sets out what an incoming Labour Government must do to address the housing crisis
We are in the grip of a housing crisis which, due to a lack of any political will to address it, is spiralling out of control. Millions of people are suffering from the appalling consequences of the lack of decent secure and genuinely affordable housing. Shelter has recently stated that one in three people are now impacted by the housing crisis. That ‘s 17.5 million people across the country.
There can be no resolution to the housing crisis without a government strategy to deliver a large scale council house building programme that will provide decent, secure and genuinely affordable social rented homes to meet the need in our communities. We are campaigning to ensure that the Labour Party leads the way in ensuring that delivery.
The Chartered Institute of Housing ‘s 2022 UK Housing Review states, “the Right to Buy has become a strategic failure in England and, unless reconsidered, the policy will continue contributing to social disadvantage and exacerbating inequalities. In response to Tory proposals to extend right to buy the Chartered Institute of Housing said, “We are at a point of crisis in this country, with over 1.1 million households on waiting lists for social housing. We need more, not less, affordable social homes.”
The incoming Labour government should draw up a long term housing strategy backed by appropriate levels of government funding which must include: fully funding 150,000 social rent homes a year, including at least 100,000 council homes with secure tenancies; fully funding the retrofitting of all council housing to address fuel poverty, the climate crisis and to improve the quality of existing homes; invest in Direct Labour Organisations to create well paid, unionised jobs and apprenticeships to deliver this; ending the disastrous right to buy policy; reviewing council housing debt to address the under-funding of housing revenue accounts; giving power to councils to license and tax holiday homes and AirBnBs.
Labour’s 2019 manifesto contained a commitment to build the council homes we need and we want the next manifesto to retain that commitment. The 2019 manifesto said, “The only way to deliver everyone’s right to a good home is to build publicly funded social housing. Labour will deliver a new social house building programme of more than a million homes over a decade, with council housing at its heart. By the end of the parliament we will be building at an annual rate of at least 150,000 council and social homes with 100,000 of these built by councils for social rent” and “We will stop the haemorrhage of low cost homes by ending the right to buy”.
Five years later, with a worsening crisis of affordability, it makes no sense to dilute that policy. Why do we need 150,00 social rent homes including 100,000 council homes? The outgoing government had a target of building 300,000 homes a year to meet demand. The rate of house building has increased significantly in recent years, but year on year there has been a failure to build genuinely affordable homes at the rate we need. In view of that failure to deliver, we called for 50 percent of those 300,000 homes to be social rented. Our manifesto commitment was hugely welcomed when it was announced in 2019, not only within the Labour movement but by the general public, housing campaigns, housing and homelessness charities and the housing sector. Any future Labour government should adopt a similarly ambitious pledge.
- You can follow the Labour Campaign for Council Housing. You can follow them on Facebook and Twitter/X.
- This article was originally published by Labour Briefing.
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