Labour’s housing plans – better, but nowhere near ambitious enough

Today Ed Miliband launches the long-awaited Lyons review, which is intended to outline how Labour would solve the housing crisis and build the homes that Britain needs, to paraphrase a couple of soundbites.

But Britain does face a housing crisis. Every year the number of homes that are built is fewer than the number of homes that are needed just to stop the crisis getting worse. Family breakup, more people living on their own and population pressures combine to create an ever increasing need that simply isn’t being filled. A family ends up homeless in Britain every eleven minutes. There are nearly 2 million people on waiting lists for social housing. And the percentage of Brits who own their own homes continues to slide, the owners and the own-nots. Housing scarcity then pushes houses up to ludicrous prices, forcing them further out of reach of first-time buyers, and entrenching an ever greater share of asset wealth in the hands of homeowners.

The Tories have presided over some of the worst excesses of the UK housing market, and they’ve completely failed on housebuilding. Cameron’s government have presided over the lowest levels of peacetime housebuilding since the 20s. Home ownership is at its lowest level since the 80s. And Labour isn’t blameless either, too often ignoring the cries of activists when in government, we presided over a housing bubble and failed to get housebuilding back on track. Britain needed hundreds of thousands of affordable homes, and we didn’t build them.

Against this background, the Lyons review seeks to turn around a ship that has been heading in the wrong direction for a long time. And – as you’d expect from a weighty report commissioned by Ed Miliband – there’s a great deal of policy detail and much of it is welcome and worthwhile. Councils will need to draw up plans to address the housing shortages in their local area rather than sticking their heads in the sand and appeasing NIMBYs. First time buyers will have the first shot at homes in their local area – and their community – meaning that in those areas where it’s hardest for young people to stay in their locality (rural areas and inner-city areas, mostly), you won’t get young people and families being forced out (if they can afford the homes, that is). At its heart, the report is a thoughtful and serious attempt to explain how Labour will hit the party’s target of 200,000 new homes a year by 2020.

So far so good then, right?

Well Labour’s housing plan is certainly better than the reality of life under the Tories. In Labour’s own press briefing, the first “key fact” is that “Under David Cameron the number of new homes being built is just half of that which is needed”.

That’s true, and bears repeating.

But it’s also worth noting that despite Labour’s focus on housebuilding, Ed Miliband has only committed to this “by 2025 for the first time in 50 years in this country we will be building as many homes as we need”. That’s right – Labour’s housing plan sees the country take until 2025 (that’s eleven years time) before we build the number of homes that Britain needs. That means 11 more years of a housing crisis getting worse before it gets better. Sure, it’ll get worse slower than under the Tory plans, but it’ll get worse all the same.

Housing is one of the biggest issues facing Britain today, Labour is putting it at the heart of the party’s election campaign – and yet our proposals just aren’t ambitious enough.

Now when I’ve raised these concerns with the Labour leadership I’ve been told that building 200,000 homes in a year is hugely challenging, that it hasn’t been achieved since the 1950s and that it takes time to build up the housebuilding sector. And that’s all fair enough. But the best way to check whether our plans are good enough is to look at the task we face and ask ourselves whether the plans we’re offering are up to that.

On housing, we’re improving, but we’re not there yet.

In truth, the Lyons report could have been far bolder, but the terms of reference it was set constrained it. Lyons was only ever trying to work out how to his 200k homes a year. And even this will prove difficult after recent announcements. Genuinely radical Labour plans for housebuilding were torpedoed by an unwillingness to allow councils to borrow for building and the incredibly foolish decision to rule out manifesto commitments on borrowing for capital spending. We’ll solve the housing crisis, slowly, over the best part of a generation. It’s still worth doing, but it doesn’t inspire and it leaves too many suffering for too long in the meantime.

There’s a poster on the wall of my office. It’s my favourite Labour Party poster. And it says simply – “Let’s build the houses – quick”. The Labour Party even sells these classic posters today, and yet we aren’t living up to this mantra ourselves. Having a home to call your own is one of the simplest and the greatest desires a person can have. And it’s falling from the reach of too many. We must be far more ambitious than this in our desire to change that fact.