Dec

Labour plans to buy back £1bn of social housing from landlords

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Social Housing:

As well as its plans
to build thousands of council homes, Labour says it’s setting aside
£1bn to buy back properties which have been sold to private
landlords, through right to buy.

Homelessness housing
charities such as Shelter, dealing day-to-day with people who are
struggling with unaffordable and unsuitable housing, have long argued
that there’s a desperate need to build social housing on a big
scale. This is something that even previous Labour governments under
Blair and Brown failed to do.

Many blame Margaret
Thatcher’s right to buy council houses scheme, and all local
councils’ failures to replace these homes when sold, for causing
Britain’s current housing crisis, but the problem is a complex one.

Many years ago, the
UK housing sector began to rely more and more on the private rented
sector (buy-to-let landlords) to take up the slack when social
housing provision declined. Enticed into the market by increasing
demand and growing market rents, due to under supply, private
landlords invested and provided much needed rental accommodation.

But the resulting
structural change in the housing market, with steadily rising rents,
coupled with a cap on the local housing allowance (LHA), meant that
many low income families were finding it an increasingly difficult to
keep a roof over their heads.

Shadow Housing
Secretary John Healey says this will change, that when Labour takes
power there will be a “housing revolution”: “We need all parts
of the housing industry firing on all cylinders.”

Alongside the Lib
Dem promise to build 100,000 homes for the social sector, Labour’s
plan is far more radical: setting aside £75bn over five years, they
say they will build 100,000 new social homes every year for five
years. These policies contrast sharply with the The Conservative
Party policy of increasing private sector home ownership.

Labour’s
proposals, billed as “social housing for the many” by those
charities and providers in the social housing sector, have been
universally welcomed by all its stakeholders: the offer would bring
council housing to the fore again, as opposed to the social housing
which is currently seen to be delivered by the housing associations.
Councils would once again have a big role to play in house building.

Strongly critical of
the Conservatives’s free market model, Mr Healey, who was briefly
Housing Minister under Gordon Brown, says that what is needed is
that, “…instead of government stepping back from these problems,
its a government that’s willing to step up.”

The biggest question
surrounding the solving of these problems at the bottom quartile of
the housing market is not so much the difference in the various
party’s proposals and doctrines, but whether Labour really can
afford the vast sums of money involved, given all the other promises
and commitments they have made.

View Full Article: Labour plans to buy back £1bn of social housing from landlords