Secure Homes for All

Secure Homes for All.

Labour Manifesto 2017:

Home is at the heart of all of our lives. It’s the foundation on which we raise our families, the bedrock for our dreams and aspirations.  But for too many people, the housing pressures they face are getting worse not better.  Britain has a housing crisis – a crisis of supply and a crisis of affordability.

After seven years of failure, the Conservatives have no plan to fix the housing crisis. Since 2010, housebuilding has fallen to its lowest level since the 1920s, rough sleeping has risen every year, rents have risen faster than incomes, there are almost 200,000 fewer home-owners, and new affordable housebuilding is at a 24-year low.

It doesn’t have to be like this.  Labour will invest to build over a million new homes. By the end of the next Parliament we will be building at least 100,000 council and housing association homes a year for genuinely affordable rent or sale.

Labour will establish a new Department for Housing to focus on tackling the crisis and to ensure housing is about homes for the many, not investment opportunities for the few. Labour’s new housing ministry will be tasked with improving the number, standards and affordability of homes.  We will overhaul the Homes and Communities Agency to be Labour’s housing delivery body, and give councils new powers to build the homes local communities need.

We will prioritise brownfield sites and protect the green belt.  We will start work on a new generation of New Towns to build the homes we need and avoid urban sprawl.

We will make the building of new homes, including council homes, a priority through our National Transformation Fund, as part of a joined-up industrial and skills strategy that ensures a vibrant construction sector with a skilled workforce and rights at work.

Labour will not only build more, we will build better.  We will insulate more homes to help people manage the cost of energy bills, to reduce preventable winter deaths, and to meet our climate change targets.  We will consult on new rules on minimum space standards to prevent rabbit hutch’ properties and on new modern standards for building  zero carbon homes’.

We will ensure that local plans address the need for older people’s housing, ensuring that choice and downsizing options are readily available.

We will keep the Land registry in public hands, where it belongs, and make ownership of land more transparent.

 

  • Home Ownership
  • Private Renters
  • Council & Social Tenants
  • Homelessness

New Economics Foundation explains “Why you can’t afford a home in the UK”.

These are many of the policy ideas being developed.

  • Setting up a National Investment Bank to support new build housing projects initiated by councils and developers.
  • Scrapping bedroom tax and benefit cap.
  • Lifting the borrowing cap in the Housing Revenue Account, enabling local authorities to borrow unto the prudential limits and build more houses.
  • Introducing regional home building targets to ensure homes are build in every area to ensure rural areas as well as urban areas benefit from new council homes.
  • Regulating private rents by linking them to measures that can determine whether they are affordable (e.g. average earnings).
  • Nationally registering private landlords and licensing them locally.
  • Ensuring tenants rights are respected and ensuring homes suitable for human habitation (minimum safety standards, free of damp and pests and so on).
  • Introducing a Land Value Tax on underdeveloped land that has planning permission.
  • Introducing ‘use it or lose it’ measures on brownfield sites to discourage land banking.
  • Allowing councils the right to compulsorily purchase (CPO) sites that are not being developed at a fair value.
  • Protecting social housing stock owned by local councils by cancelling right-to-buy scheme.
  • Redirecting some of the £14 billion tax relief offered to private landlords to help struggling tenants (e.g. deposit problem).
  • Empowering tenants in housing associations through co-operative models of local management.
  • Levying higher council tax rates on properties left empty.

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