Labour Housing Group: We’re launching a commission on council homebuilding

Solving Britain’s housing crisis will require action for a sustained period on many fronts, including reform of the private rented sector, changes to the mortgage market and financial regulation, and a properly functioning welfare state to help people facing homelessness. But no response to the housing crisis is complete without building new homes, and history shows us that we will never build all the homes we need without the public sector taking a leading role.

For more than a generation now, the private sector has been left to lead on homebuilding efforts in our country. As a result, the supply of new homes, and of council and social housing in particular, has fallen far short of what we need. This housing shortage limits life chances: children growing up in overcrowded homes, young people forced into sofa-surfing, young families stuck in temporary accommodation unable to put down roots, older people renting privately without the security of tenure they need.

The consequences of poor-quality housing on health are widely understood; the responsibilities were linked together in the ministerial briefs of the 1945 Labour government. But we must continue to highlight its impact, particularly as the pandemic has exposed the appalling inequalities driven by poor housing and health.

Councils across the country know this. Since the turn of the 21st century, many have been doing all they can to get more council and other affordable homes built. We have seen outstanding commitment from Labour councils delivering genuinely affordable homes, pushing at the boundaries of local authority finance restrictions, welcoming additional borrowing limits, innovating with modern methods of construction and coordinating land opportunities to maximise the delivery of homes.

Despite significant achievements, the councils making such efforts still face practical restraints and hard limits – including access to investment, capacity and land. We need to overcome these barriers and step up the homebuilding role of councils to meet this century’s challenges.

Labour representatives and activists, along with housing experts from across the country, are coming together to work on a report setting out how these barriers could be addressed. This project will bring together elected politicians with backgrounds in different tiers of local government with a track record in council homebuilding, trade union and tenant representatives, and the advice of recognised experts in the field.

We will produce a report that describes councils’ current achievements in building new council homes; identifies the limits on their abilities to build more homes, particularly for social rent, under the current landscape; and sets out what changes would be needed to enable councils to play a leading role in building the homes we need in the 21st century.

We believe that it is only with long-term, structural changes to local authority powers and financing settlements that the full potential of council home building can be realised. We want to understand what the right relationship between local and regional tiers of government should be and how 21st century council home building differs from previous generations. Our project, which aims to report in September 2021, will provide ideas for future Labour manifestos and governments to consider.

In 1997, decades of underinvestment had led to a shameful need for major repairs and refurbishment of council housing, leading to focus on investment in ‘Decent Homes’. But this focus meant that the urgent need for new homes was not addressed until too late. We want the next Labour government to be ready to hit the ground running and to support Labour councillors to build the new council homes we need.