With ever increasing waiting lists and the impact of government welfare reform measures, the Labour Party is asking what more can be done to boost the supply of council housing with limited funding?
As the representative body of ALMOs which manage more than 650,000 council homes across 50 local authorities, the Party is initiating a debate on the future of council housing and the role it should play in meeting the country’s housing shortage.
This will include a fringe event at the Labour Party conference where speakers will include John Healey MP, former Housing Minister, Cllr Sir Steve Houghton, Leader of Barnsley Council and myself as Chair of the NFA. The event will be chaired by Heidi Alexander MP, Vice Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for ALMOs.
The event will be entitled: ‘‘Arms’ length, but hands on, council housing’’ and areas to be covered in the discussion will include:
- Building new council housing ,
- The impact of welfare reform,
- Tackling fuel poverty
- Promoting the arms-length model of management
‘Labour Government must release funds to build affordable rented homes’
The initiative has been welcomed by Sedgemoor Labour councillors . Hamp councillor Steve Austen, a Housing Officer by profession and currently Mayor of Bridgwater , said “With ever increasing lists of local residents applying for a home from their local authorities that manage the Housing Register it is imperative that a Labour Government release funding and supports the building of affordable rented homes. Whilst in area our residents have benefited from “decent homes” improvements however most of the stock is old; it is therefore more imperative for our area that we build good quality housing suitable for the future.
Steve, whose District ward includes the vast council built estates of Bridgwatrs Hamp ward, is also a Town Councillor for the Westover ward which includes the 1960’s West Street social housing development. He continued “The Welfare Reform act has done very little if anything to release family accommodation back into the system to alleviate the shortage of these types of properties; all this act has achieved is create stress and heartache for the most vulnerable in our society that can least afford to pay. This system must be scrapped and a review undertaken to create family accommodation as soon as possible“.
‘Conservative policies are not working’
Cllr Julian Taylor, Labour councillor for the town’s Eastover ward, said ”It is clear that with so many families on the Sedgemoor waiting list for social housing that Conservative policies are not working, With the influx of new people for the EDF Hinkley Point project this situation is not going to improve. We need more affordable rented accommodation now.”
I would challenge the statement that conservative policies are not working. They are working very well and doing exactly what the tories intend them to do i.e. batter the working class. If we really want to have housing at rents within the realms of sanity we need to have rent controls and we also need to take back into public (i.e. council) ownership those ex council houses which are now being rented out by private landlords. We also need to do sometning to bring to heel those landlords who allow their properties to fall into disrepair by not spending their revenue on maintaining them properly. Housing is a basic human right and not a privilege to be used to exploit ordinary people for the benefit of property speculators.