Thank you Ed for putting housing centre stage, but let’s go further

Out on the doorstep I hear it all the time: “I’d hate to be starting out now”. Wages are flat, jobs are scarce and the idea of owning your own home is vanishing fast for most young people right across the country. Even renting is becoming a challenge – more and more young people are ending up back at home with parents – often after moving out and renting their own place in the meantime. Young people starting out now are finding doors slammed in their faces every way they turn.

House building is at its lowest level in a generation and recent figures from housing charity Shelter show that in Nottinghamshire the average deposit for a first time buyer is almost £18,000 – little surprise to those who are struggling to get the money together. For people just starting out now, it could take 10 years to save that much, while paying higher prices than ever in the private rented sector.

Even more worrying, we’ve started to hear anecdotally of unscrupulous landlords kicking families out of rented homes so they can hike the prices up. The stats bear it out – last year the biggest increase in homelessness came from households who had been forced out of rented accommodation. There were 34,000 families with children accepted onto Council statutory homeless lists last year. This shameful situation needs tackling urgently.

So I’m pleased that even though we’re not in Government at the moment, across all Departments Labour is setting the agenda on tackling the housing crisis.

The Shadow Communities team are consulting on changes to the private rented sector –stronger regulation of landlords and letting agents, safeguards against poor service and a crackdown on rip-off fees. The Shadow Chancellor said recently that if we took the IMF’s advice on infrastructure investment we could build 400,000 new homes and support 600,000 new jobs in construction and the supply industries – like the concrete plant and quarry in Nottinghamshire where I worked in the office when I first left school.

And Ed Miliband is  arguing that although the Tories try to blame local Councils for not granting enough planning permission, too many developers have planning permission and are simply not building – sitting on the land waiting for demand to push prices up.

Proposing tough action for developers who could build but aren’t doing so is welcome news. All options are on the table – including giving local authorities ‘use it or lose it’ powers to charge fees for unnecessarily sitting on land with planning permission or, as a last resort, issuing a compulsory purchase order.

But there is much more to do if we are to even begin to stem the tide of this crisis.

Firstly, we should announce right now as a Party that if elected in 2015 we will repeal the bedroom tax as soon as possible and end the pernicious system that is forcing people from their homes whilst doing nothing to tackle the real causes of the housing shortage. It’s unfair and it’s unworkable – as long as there are no smaller properties available and people can’t afford to pay the charge, squeezed local Councils will end up footing the bill for yet more Tory failure.

And we need to get back to building rented housing. We need more council homes, more social housing and more housing co-operatives to give people a real alternative to greedy landlords and letting agents. This would bring rents down to an affordable level, not just to provide a fairer alternative to the benefits cap, but to help all hardworking people here in Sherwood and across the country.

And we must be able to focus on the local benefit of new housing developments – good quality homes that are affordable to people in the area strengthen and support communities. Too often when people object to new building development it’s not because they are not sympathetic to the needs of local people who can’t get on the housing ladder. It’s because big 5 bedroom houses with double garages are not going to solve the local housing problems for their kids and their neighbours’ kids, and because the necessary investment into infrastructure isn’t put in place as well. We must give local councils more powers to send developers back to the drawing board, to require a percentage of new development to be affordable and available for the local community.

I’m fighting locally and nationally to make decent and fair housing a priority. It’s urgently needed and it’s vital for health and education outcomes too. So thank you Ed Miliband for putting housing centre stage, as our party meets to debate the policy agenda for 2015. I hope we take this opportunity to be bold and set out the Labour way to end this housing crisis.