We need 155,000 council homes a year - not what Labour is currently offering.
Today, the Labour Campaign for Council Housing is launching its campaign to radicalise Labour’s housing policy to ensure our party tackles the housing crisis when in government.
Housing is the greatest domestic challenge facing our country. There are 277,000 homeless households, including over 4,000 rough sleepers.
A staggering one million households are on the housing waiting list. A whole generation of younger people have been shut out from home ownership and older people are increasingly getting trapped in the private rented sector too.
By 2040, up to one-third of 60-year-olds will be renting privately. More people in the private rented sector is bad news for everyone but landlords; rents are higher, conditions are poorer, and tenancies are less secure than in the social sector.
The roots of this crisis can be traced back to the legacy of the Thatcher Governments.
In the post-war era, governments of all colours accepted the housing policy introduced by Labour politicians like Attlee and Bevan, which was to provide investment to councils to build housing.
Rents were set at social rents, so they were affordable for all, and tenancies were guaranteed for life to provide security to families living in them.
The result was that the country built an average of 125,861 social rented homes a year between 1946-1980.
When Thatcher came to power, her Government withdrew grant funding for councils to build housing.
Governments that followed failed to reverse Thatcher’s policy and the result has been that on average a paltry 27,209 social rented homes have been built between 1981-2017.
Together with the disastrous policy of right-to-buy, which has seen the sale of over 1.8 million council homes in England to date, this has caused a severe lack of affordable housing.
Not only this, but it has also meant that supply of housing more generally has plummeted.
Between 1946-1980 an average of 247,100 homes were built a year; between 1981-2017 this had fallen to 150,907, with the entire reduction accounted for by the drop in social rented homes built.
When the state builds a significant number of homes, this keeps house prices and rents low for everyone by keeping supply high.
We need, then, to get back to the days of building social rented council housing on a mass scale to begin reversing this decades long failure of our housing policy.
Shelter’s recent ‘A Vision for Social Housing’ report agrees; they conclude that 3.1 million new social rented homes need to be built over the next 20 years – an average of 155,000 per year.
The Labour Party has come a long way in its housing policy in recent years.
As recently as 2015, Labour refused to even mention council housing in its general election manifesto.
With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the party on a platform of building 100,000 council homes a year, this signalled a significant shift in Labour’s housing priorities.
However, this has yet to translate into the transformative policies which would tackle the housing crisis once and for all.
Labour’s ‘Housing for the Many’ paper committed to building one million genuinely affordable homes over ten years.
A majority of these will be for social rent. This equals an average of at least 50,000 social rented homes a year, including the biggest council housebuilding programme in nearly forty years.
National housing grant investment would be reset to £4 billion a year. While this is a step in the right direction, these commitments would not meet the scale of ambition needed to solve our housing crisis.
50,000 social rented homes a year is well short of the 155,000 needed, and the council housing commitment only ties the party into building little over 15,000 council homes a year – nowhere near the 100,000 pledged by Corbyn in his leadership campaign.
Furthermore, £4 billion housing grant per year is unlikely to be enough to deliver even 50,000 social rented homes. On top of all this, the party has only committed to suspending right-to-buy.
We should be ending right-to-buy once and for all to preserve our social housing stock and ensure a Conservative Government can never bring it back.
The Labour Campaign for Council Housing’s demands are simple: Labour should adopt a policy of building 155,000 social rented homes a year.
At least 100,000 of these should be council homes, in line with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership election commitment.
There should be £10 billion grant a year to fund councils to build them, £100,000 per home. And right-to-buy should be ended.
We have produced a model motion to submit to Labour Conference calling for these commitments to be adopted as party policy and will be contacting all CLPs in the coming days to encourage you to pass this motion.
We have a huge opportunity to solve the housing crisis in government by building high-quality social rented council housing on a mass scale. Let’s make sure we don’t squander it.
Jamie Sweeney is a Labour member writing on behalf of the Labour Campaign for Council Housing. The campaign can be contacted by emailing labourcouncilhousingcampaign@gmail.com for those interested in the Conference motion or volunteering with the campaign.
10 Responses to “Labour must be more ambitious on building council housing”
Tom Sacold
Immigration is running at 600,000 a year. That’s the size of a small city.
We need to deal with the root cause of the housing problem first !!!
David Michael Webb
LMAO…on what planet are you living? Labour are NEVER going to get into power. We are currently in the grip of the worst government in living memory, a worse than useless lame PM, and a bunch of clueless MP’s yet, your party is lagging so far down in the polls even the dead duck Lib Dems are doing better. In Scotland you are down to single figure support. No matter what you promise, no one will believe you, and where are you getting this money to build all these homes? You had 10 years in power but did nothing except burden us all with PPI bills.
Dave Roberts
I keep referring to this site http://www.helalabbas.com but this forum never references it. Look at the article “Small is Beautiful” and post it here instead of the self defeating whinging whining articles like this from a nobody.
Wolfgang Kuchler
A good policy and article, and clearly much needed. As the comments show we have been brainwashed into thinking this – the lack of council housing – is inevitable or something we have to put up with. So people would rather tell themselves stories (net migration is actually 283,000 this year and most immigrants live in – bad – private rented accommodation – https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/jan/25/is-immigration-causing-the-uk-housing-crisis )
David Michael’s first point I get, Labour helped create the problem so it will take a lot of effort to convince people things will be different but as to the money, we are a rich country, and part of any convincing platform for Corbyn has to be not just about taxing the very rich, but saying that so called “middle class” people who have several holidays and eat out etc, can be called upon to make a bit of sacrifice.
Steve Gerrard
This issue definitely shouldn’t be allowed to slip down the political agenda.