Labour has promised on Saturday it will deliver “the biggest boost” to affordable housing for a generation ahead of the party’s annual conference in Liverpool.
Deputy party leader and shadow levelling up secretary Angela Rayner said it will be her “number one focus” to build social housing if Labour wins in the next general election.
The party has vowed to “unlock” government grants to building homes and make it harder for developers to “wriggle out of their responsibilities.”
Conservative governments in the past thirteen years “have taken a sledgehammer to that foundation and caused a housing emergency,” Ms. Rayner claimed in the statement.
“The next Labour government will deliver the biggest boost to affordable, social, and council housing for a generation, and get those social homes built, brick by brick,” she said.
“Developers have been let off the hook and for too long allowed to wriggle out of their responsibilities to provide new social and affordable homes. Labour will robustly hold them to account to deliver on their obligations to deliver affordable housing,” she added.
Affordable housing is housing for sale or rent for those who can’t afford to pay the market value. To qualify for affordable housing grants, a property needs to be sold or rented at around 20 percent below local market prices.
To prevent developers from “wriggling out of their responsibilities,” Labour said it will set up an “expert, central Take Back Control Unit” to train local authorities on how to negotiate with developers, improve transparency around the viability process for the development of new affordable and social housing by publishing a guidance on viability levels across different parts of the country and creating a model assessment form that developers and councils can use, and only allow developers to challenge cases where there are genuine barriers to delivering these new homes.
To channel public funds into social and affordable housing, the party said it plans to enable officials to recycle funding for no-go projects and funnel them into projects where there is higher demand.
Rayner: Unlocking Funds Is a Priority
Asked why she believes developers had been “let off the hook,” Ms. Rayner told BBC Radio 4’s “Today“ programme, “Because we’re not getting the social housing that we need. We’re not replenishing that stock.”She said that is part of the problem, adding, “but the other part of it is ... the government have [sic] failed to be able to get the money out the door, to work with developers to deliver on the social housing and also work with local authorities.
Asked about an estimate that it will cost almost £13 billion a year to create an extra 90,000 social rent homes that are needed, Ms. Rayner said, “We’ve got ... nearly £2 billion a year that’s going back to the Treasury because the government are [sic] not able to get it out the door.”
“The first thing we need to do is actually spend the money and get those houses built and that’s our absolute determination to deliver on that,” she said.
Ms. Rayner refused to specify a target number of housing she will deliver, but said she would want to “exceed” the Tories’ unmet target of 300,000 new homes a year.
Asked how much of the new housing will be “affordable,” she said the Conservative government is now “delivering around 25 percent of affordable housing” and suggested Labour will do better.
Asked why Labour opposed the government’s plan to scrap the requirement to include nutrient loads in urban wastewater in planning, which the government said would “unlock housing development,” Ms. Rayner said the “binary choice that you can’t protect the environment and build the homes” is “rubbish.”
She accused the government of wanting to “basically give a blank check,” saying the policy “could have been very damaging for our environment” if it wasn’t blocked in Parliament.
“And that’s not the way to build houses. There is a way of building houses that doesn’t damage the environment,” she said.
