Right to buy is Wrong for London

London has a crisis. Londoners know it, we live with it every day. Quite simply, there aren’t enough decent homes to go round, and we’re not building enough new ones.

Hundreds of thousands of families are stuck in temporary accommodation or on social housing waiting lists; homeless families are housed many miles from the place they call home; housing costs are eating up more and more of the family income; renters are being ripped off; and first time buyers can’t afford a deposit.

This is a crisis with human consequences for so many people of all ages which cannot be reduced to the bureaucratic speak of shortfalls, targets and units. We are talking about the place where people anchor their entire lives, that gives them a sense of belonging, a sense of security.

In London more luxury flats are being built than ever before – including thousands bought by wealthy foreigners and left empty as assets to appreciate rather than homes in which to live – yet we are building fewer than half the homes we need. This is a crisis that needs urgent action.

Should we be surprised that the Tories have come up with a scheme that will make things even worse?

The Tories Right to Buy plans will make decent homes even harder to come by for Londoners. In the first six months of 2014/15 under the revived Right to Buy the Tories built just one replacement home in London for every 23 they sold off. We already have more than half a million people on social housing waiting lists.

What’s more, we know that around a third of properties acquired through Right to Buy in London are now in the hands of private landlords – never what any previous government of any colour intended.

We have to find a way of making it possible for more young couples to buy their own home – that’s why Labour have promised to build 200,000 homes a year. This Tory policy will set back the best efforts by Labour boroughs to replace London’s depleted social housing stock leaving more and more families unable to find a place to live.

This Tory plan would be bad for London, and even on its own terms it makes no sense. The Conservatives don’t seem to understand what Housing Associations actually are – they are charitable bodies. They cannot be compelled to sell, and they plan to challenge this policy in the courts – and even if they could, the National Housing Association has estimated the total cost at around £20bn.

The Tories’ housing policies appear to have been dreamt up in the out of touch world that most of the cabinet seem to inhabit.  Promising to build 400,000 homes for £1bn is impossible, the bricks alone would cost more than that.

Solving London’s housing crisis means helping more Londoners into the homes they want to live in. Of course that means helping social housing tenants take the step into owning their own place, but throwing that stock away at a massive cost to the taxpayer cannot be the answer.

We need more social housing properly maintained, more affordable high quality rented housing, longer tenancies, and the opportunity of home ownership through innovative solutions like shared equity, and co-operative approaches.

This requires long term sustained commitment. The crisis with which Londoners live will not be fixed by reviving out of time ideas from the 1980s.

The Tories are out of ideas, out of energy and they are running out of road. Britain only succeeds when working people succeed, and from house-building to fair pay, tackling the cost of living to protecting the NHS, it is becoming increasingly clear that only Labour is offering the answers that Londoners need.