“Everyone knows someone affected by the housing crisis. Labour is offering real change to fix it.”
Jeremy Corbyn
Labour’s manifesto will include new plans for the biggest council and social housing programme in decades and will mean:
- scaling up council house building to be building 100,000 council homes a year by the end of the parliament, a more than 3,500% increase.
- building at least 50,000 additional genuinely affordable homes a year through Housing Associations by the end of the parliament.
- at least 150,000 new council and social homes a year within five years, delivering the biggest council housebuilding programme since the years immediately after the Second World War, and the biggest overall affordable housebuilding programme since the 1960s.
This is nothing short of a housing revolution and compares with Tory inaction in terms of tackling the housing crisis. Government figures show that last year the number of Government-funded affordable homes for social rent built fell by 90%, to fewer than 1,000. Government figures also suggest fewer than 3,000 council homes were built.
The scale of Labour’s building programme will mean that homes will be available in every area for families, trapped younger renters, and older people in sub-standard homes.
The homes will be built to cutting edge design and green standards and will be paid for with funding from Labour’s Social Transformation Fund. Half of this Fund – around £75bn over five years – will be allocated to housing.
As part of the new programme, Labour will scrap the Conservatives’ absurd definition of ‘affordable’ housing replacing it with a new Labour definition linked to local incomes, including social rent – which works out at around half the level of market rents – alongside new living rent and homes for low-cost ownership.
As Jeremy Corbyn said “Housing should be for the many, not a speculation opportunity for dodgy landlords and the wealthy few.”
“Everyone knows someone affected by the housing crisis. Labour is offering real change to fix it.”
