Party Lines: October 28th

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

Yesterday Ed Miliband chose to focus on housing benefit at PMQs and play the long game. However the tactic appears to have borne fruit already, as the coalition’s housing policies have dominated today’s media coverage.

Ken Livingstone was on the Today Programme this morning, talking about what he called the “human tragedy” of housing in London:

“House prices in London are just completely unreal, someone earning £70,000 can’t afford to buy a home, either you cap the rents – which I’d like to see instead of subsidising landlords – or we’re going to see thousands of people displaced from central London.”

“We know London councils are starting to make block bookings at bed and breakfast places along the south coast, many of those areas haven’t got the school places or social care support that will be needed.”

Later today, in response to Boris Johnson’s bizarre u-turn on coalition housing policy, Livingstone commented:

“Boris Johnson’s chaos over the Government’s disastrous plans to cap housing benefit demonstrates his complete inability to put the interests of Londoners first before the interests of the Conservative Party and his own self interest.”

“Boris Johnson cannot make his mind up between condemning changes to housing benefits or a robust defence of the Government just hours later. Because he is a Conservative he will always be under pressure to put his government before the interests of London.”

Shadow communities and local government secretary Caroline Flint described the coalition’s housing policy as a “hammer blow” to families and the construction industry:

“One minister had already been hauled before the Commons for getting his facts wrong. Today figures produced by his own department show that the Housing Minister doesn’t even know how many homes have been built.”

“Labour built more than half a million new affordable homes in government and even in the teeth of recession we built more than 50,000 new affordable homes. The scale and severity of the coalition’s cuts to the housing budget have dealt a hammer blow to the hopes of thousands of families trying to get their own home, and to the construction industry, which is vital for our economic recovery. The least we should expect is for them to be straight with people.”

And speaking to Sky News Douglas Alexander was concerned about the impact of housing benefit cuts on people who had lost their jobs, and yet are unable to find alternative employment.

“If you look at the package of savings, the Conservatives are trying to take three times as much money off an unemployed person who’s found themselves unable to secure work after a year than over the cap they’re spending all the time talking about.”

“It’s wrong that if somebody has been doing everything they can do get into work, at a time in the economy when five people are chasing every single vacancy, that you decide as this government has, to punish them after a year by cutting ten per cent of the cash they have to pay their rent.”