Trying to find time to write a column between canvass sessions and leaflet delivery drops is not easy during an election campaign. Yet what is so striking during doorstep chats or casual discussion with voters is the gulf between their priority concerns and Westminster debate. Nowhere is this more apparent than when talking about housing.

Here in Dagenham, housing and immigration are the two stand-out issues. Often, of course, they are interrelated as many assume their inability to get adequately housed is linked to local demographic change. Thousands remain on the allocation and transfer lists. The pressures on social housing bleed into the private rented sector and abusive landlordism. Housing politics dominate the local political scene; a debate that is strangely absent from Westminster.

Change is coming

But slowly policy is shifting. We are currently building new large council houses - the first to be built for some 25 years in the borough. We are introducing innovative ways to ensure that landlords, tenants and owners sort out their front gardens. We are also discussing how to regulate local landlords and call them to account.

On the national stage the past six months or so have seen significant changes to housing policy and housing minister John Healey must be congratulated for the work he has done since taking office. All my local councillors see him as the best housing minister for many a year.

For example, almost lost in the immediate post-Budget debate was the much awaited paper on the review of the system for financing council housing in England. The paper from John Healey, entitled Council housing: a real future, didn’t disappoint. This is clearly a genuine and radical attempt to not just bury the Byzantine housing revenue account regime, but to carefully craft a sustainable self-financing system for council housing.

Far-reaching reform

My take on this is that it is almost certainly the most significant and far-reaching reform of social housing for more than 30 years - and that, as its title states, it offers a stable basis for council housing. Up until now, councils have been subject to the vagaries of funding decisions made by civil servants and ministers, without any understanding of local circumstances and ambitions for housing services in communities.

The reform offers councils the opportunity to plan with certainty, retaining the full proceeds of any land or right to buy sales to be reinvested in building new homes or regenerating run-down estates.

It is a self-financing system and, while housing debt would be redistributed nationally, allowances have been increased to help offset the cost of locally servicing these sums. The paper recognises that the £3 billion-plus backlog of works to housing stock, above decent homes costs, will be prioritised in the next comprehensive spending review.

Over the past couple of years there has been a growing call from local government - interestingly from Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative councils - to be released from the shackles which inhibited them from building new council homes. I have greatly welcomed Mr Healey’s words and actions to respond to this.

In my own council at Barking & Dagenham we have started building 63 larger family-size houses and have been awarded grant from the Homes and Communities Agency to start to build another 82 in this year.

One of my reasons for enthusiastically supporting the proposals is that this provides the financial headroom nationally to build 10,000 new council homes a year. This plateau is calculated to be reached in 2014.

Safeguarding the future

Of course, this on its own is insufficient to meet housing needs but it would represent a fresh and additional source of affordable housing to supplement housing association supply.

There has been a lot of talk about localism from all political parties and rightly so. In relation to affordable housing, the diminution of the role of councils since the late 1970s has contributed to the lack of local accountability and transparency for vital services. Strengthening the position and safeguarding the future of council housing helps address the issue.

The proposals packaged in the review paper are now out to consultation. I hope that local government will seize this chance. Everyone involved in housing knows that the current system of funding council housing is broken beyond repair and now there is a credible and serious offer on the table to be accepted.

Whatever the outcome of events on 6 May, housing need will not go away. Indeed, all predictions are for waiting lists and overcrowding to grow. I suspect that whoever forms the next government is likely to run with the content of Council housing: a real future.

Going into this election, I now feel we have more to offer local people in terms of the politics of housing than we have for the past 13 years. Local authorities are on the front foot and at national level things are moving. Are people listening? We will find out in a couple of weeks.

Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham

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