Everyone deserves a decent home. This is an abiding Labour principle and my aim as housing minister – whether people own their home outright, have a mortgage, rent privately or live in public housing. It is something that can’t just be left to the market. Labour is already showing that we’ll use the power of government and the benefit of public investment.
Twelve years ago, housing in Britain was in a mess. We inherited a £19bn backlog of repairs to public housing. Today, more than 80% of these properties are weatherproof and warm, and many thousands have new kitchens and bathrooms. Parallel to this, having reduced emissions in new homes by 40%, new standards are in place that mean all homes are built as zero-carbon from 2016.
Labour is also helping those in difficulty with mortgage repayments. Free debt advice, support with interest payments and legal advice has so far helped 300,000 people stay in their homes.
By far our biggest challenge however, is that Britain has too few affordable homes. Faced with the sharpest recession for half a century, private sector housebuilding fell 50% in a year. The government could easily have done the same and given up on building new homes the country needs – echoing the inaction of the step-back-and-do-nothing Tory administrations of the 1980s and early-1990s.
Instead, we stepped up our public investment with a housing pledge this June that boosted building by an extra £1.5bn. This reinforces our aim to see 112,000 new affordable homes built during the next 18 months. Labour is backing developers and housing associations with investment. We are also backing local authorities to build new council homes again. Forty-seven councils will start more than 2,000 new homes this year – the largest such building programme in almost two decades, and with more to come. Such investment is also creating tens of thousands of construction jobs, as well as getting private sector developers to guarantee apprenticeships and jobs for local people.
At the same time, however, we are seeing the two faces of the Tories. David Cameron likes to display social concern but, in practice, Caroline Spelman incites their council leaders to turn down planning developments for the affordable housing our country needs.
With confidence returning to the construction industry, her timing could not have been any worse. Indeed, it led the Home Builders Federation to say it ‘would lead to a hiatus in planning for housing that could only exacerbate the supply crisis’. The Tories’ plans would wreck the recovery. The choice between Labour and the Conservatives is clear.
I’ve published plans to dismantle an over-centralised system of housing finance, to allow councils to keep future rents and sales income. We’re also reforming allocations to ensure people feel they’re getting a fair shot at living in new homes, while at the same time tackling the associated myths about queue jumping. And we’re cracking down on sub-lettings fraud.
The Tories’ intent is different. What they say and do shows this. Witness (as Andy Slaughter highlights below) their flagship council in Hammersmith & Fulham and talk of council homes as ‘barracks for the poor’, where the leader refers to ‘tearing down the Berlin wall of varying tenure and rent levels that operates between the private rented and social rented sectors’. This same leader heads up the Tories’ Council Innovation Unit.
It is clear that Cameron holds the same sweeping Tory view, though he says it in softer terms. Of course, some estates and some tenants have deep-seated problems. But, in truth, councils and housing associations give millions of people a decent start in life and the security they would otherwise have been unable to afford.
Cameron and George Osborne have both told us that Tories in town halls are showing what the Tories would do in power in Whitehall. For 8 million people in Britain, council and housing association tenants, the Tories are a real threat to their security. For Labour, the home is where our political heart is. We need to fight the Tories’ plans, fight on our record and fight for everyone in Britain to have a decent home to live in.