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.
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10 Responses to “Labour must be more ambitious on building council housing”
Lee Rigby Forever
Not one mention of our troops. What a surprise…
Ken Patterson
It is true that the Blair government did not build many council houses but this does not mean they did not invest in housing. In 1997 the incoming Labour Government was left with a council housing stock that was in very poor condition after the the years of Thatcher’s misrule. They made a decision to bring the existing stock up to a decent standard, rather than invest in new houses.
With hindsight, in 2019, this may well seem to be a mistake but in 1997 the country did not have such a lack of housing and we did have council houses which were a disgrace. Labour brought essentially all council houses up to a reasonable standard by 2007, a big success. The trouble is that since 2010 the Tories and their LibDem friends have sold lots more council houses (to themselves, most Tory MPs own multiple houses) and built virtually none. They are now threatening to sell off housing association houses.
Fanatical Tory privatisation dogma is the problem. This campaign is well worth supporting.
Oh – and we will need lots of immigration to build the houses as the Tories have also wrecked so much of our vocational training for builders, electricians, plasterers etc.
Dave Roberts
Ken Patterson. We won’t need immigration if we train the people we need as is laid out in http://www.helalabbas.com in the article The Campaign for Real Education.
wg
@Ken Patterson – it was a Labour government that offloaded council estates to private enterprises: they did so under the advice of the Fabians, who had produced a document “A Transfer of Affections”.
My belief was that the strategy was to separate the Labour Party from its responsibility to house our own people – how possibly could the Labour Party justify giving houses to the incoming hordes whilst our own people were sleeping on the pavements?
The answer was to offload council estates and distance themselves from any housing issues that resulted from Labour’s immigration policies.
Of course, now we are all to be grateful for the Labour Party coming out and fighting for council housing.
Dave Roberts
You are of course totally correct WG. ALMOs where the council handed control of its housing stock to variously named private organisations that had ” Community” in the title was privitisation by another name and method. In East London we now have Tower Hamlets Community Housing which is in effect private with no tenant input at all apart from the occasional “consultation” which is totally ignored as the officials on whacking great salaries decide everything in the deals they do with private investors.
This all started under Blair and would continue under Corbyn, not that he’s ever going to be elected as PM. What about one of the sensible article from Abbas Uddin up here editors? That guy has actually run something, Tower Hamlets Council and ran it well.