The housing crisis cannot be resolved without large scale council house building

These are the comments of the Campaign in response to the housing content of Keir Starmer’s recent speech.

“The Labour Campaign for Council Housing was disappointed that in his recent speech, Keir Starmer associated “fixing the housing crisis” only with with providing young people with the prospect of owning their own home. There was nothing about council housing or even renting in general in the speech.

As a Party Labour was committed at its conference last year and in the Manifesto to

· £10 billion grant annually to build 100,000 council homes a year and

· Ending right to buy.

The voting on the composite resolution was unanimous. The opinion of the membership is clear.

The housing crisis has been exacerbated by the pandemic. There is no way that it can be resolved without a large scale council house building programme and an end to the loss of stock through right to buy.

‘Generation rent’ needs decent, secure and affordable homes to rent, and the best means of delivering that is through council housing.

One of the consequences of large scale council house building is that hundreds of thousands of people will no longer be forced into the market. It is therefore, highly likely, that market prices will come down as a result, for those who want, and are able to afford to buy their own home .

We are calling on Party members, CLPs, MPs and affiliated trades unions to lobby the leadership to maintain existing policies and to pressure the government to provide funding for a large scale social rent house building programme now.”