Housing is a massive problem, locally and nationally.
There are more than 4,000 people on the waiting list at Stroud District Council – and they have done more than most over the last few years to try to keep up with demand.
We desperately need more homes that people can afford to rent and buy. I think that as an issue every family in the constituency is affected in one way or another.
This Wednesday’s budget should see an announcement that the government will top up the affordable homes programme with an extra £500m (making £11.5bn over five years). On top of previous announcements, that’s an extra 33,000 houses nationally, with a focus on social rent housing (broadly, what used to be known as council housing).
At the same time, the government will try to bring more certainty to the sector with a new five-year ‘social housing rent settlement’. that will give local authority landlords more long-term certainty on funding and allow them to invest in tens of thousands of new homes. This stability should give providers a predictable cash-flow and encourage more investment in home building.
Existing social housing stock will also be protected by reducing the discounts available to purchasers under the Right to Buy scheme. This was the mechanism that meant that tenants could buy their council houses at a heavily discounted rate (up to 70%), to encourage home ownership. But this had the effect of reducing the amount of affordable homes available to rent – and nearly half those houses initially sold to tenants are now owned by private landlords.
Councils will also be able to use 100% of the money raised by sales to replace the houses that are sold off under Right to Buy – which has never been the case before.
At the same time, Labour has been addressing the shortage of new builds more generally. The target of 1.5m new homes in five years is very ambitious, and has my total support. But we need to be careful that new builds are sustainable, built to a high standard by well qualified workers (and inspectors, planners and so on), with a proper infrastructure and in suitable locations.
It’s another good example of this government beginning to sort out the mess we inherited.
