Vote for me

Posted by: Jules Birch

01/09/2010

As Labour members start voting in the leadership election today the candidates are queuing up to admit that the party did not do enough on housing. But the new ideas seem to be coming from the also-rans rather than the front-runners.

The most eye-catching proposal so far came yesterday from former schools secretary Ed Balls (109/1 at Betfair), who is backed not just by former welfare secretary Yvette Cooper (his wife) but also by former housing minister John Healey and former London mayor Ken Livingstone. 

The plan is a direct challenge to the economic orthodoxy on cutting the deficit. Balls does not just defend Healey’s pre-election plans against coalition cuts but goes further, arguing that  the public finances are £12bn better off than at the time of the Budget in March and that half of that should be used for a housebuilding programme to create 100,000 more affordable homes and 750,000 jobs.

And he says Labour has to admit where it got it wrong too. ‘The truth is that whilst we made progress, Labour leaders over several decades never paid enough sustained attention to housing to make it the priority it deserved. That must change. We now need a strong housing policy to support our economy, to provide the homes Britain badly needs and to reconnect with the voters we lost, both young families who want a home of their own and those queuing patiently for social housing.’

In his manifesto, Andy Burnham (45/1) agrees that ‘Labour’s failure to build more council homes early in the life of the government was a major mistake’ and proposing giving local authorities ‘extended prudential borrowing powers’ to buy up private rented homes owned by absentee landlords that fall into disrepair. 

But he is also proposing a radical shake-up of the tax system with a call for a land value tax, an annual levy on the market rental value of land that would replace property taxes like stamp duty and also yield revenue to protect public services. ‘It’s time to lose New Labour’s timidity in the face of tax and make a moral argument for it playing a bigger part in deficit reduction,’ he says. ‘It is fairer than sudden and deep spending cuts, which will leave vulnerable people without support and forever change the character of our public services. But, with LVT, we can support the vulnerable and protect public services while also taking away taxes that are a barrier to people in the bottom and middle thirds getting on in life – keeping in place what was important about New Labour.’

The other outsider, Diane Abbott (249/1), has been critical of the coalition’s housing benefit cuts and David Cameron’s ideas on security of tenure and sees social housing as a priority. But she doesn’t seem to have much new to say beyond that. 

Which leaves the two front-runners. David Miliband (2/5) pledges in a very New Labour way to ‘ensure we build more council housing to rent and affordable housing to buy’ and he also signals something of a break with the Labour past. 

‘Our manifesto commitment, that would have allowed councils to once again build on a large scale, was absolutely right. However, we should have arrived at this position much earlier. We rightly focused first on improving the stock – through the Decent Homes programme – but should have acted quicker to increase supply. We need to find ways of meeting the demand for new social and affordable housing.’

Ed Miliband (3/1) goes further with a direct appeal to the Labour members who battled with the leadership at party conferences throughout the noughties. ‘It’s not naive, it’s rational to say that on agency workers, on housing, on tuition fees our members got it right and we got it wrong,’ he says.

The idea of a Living Wage of £7.60 an hour - ‘the minimum hourly wage necessary for housing, food and other basic needs for an individual’ - at the heart of his campaign. And part of his case that Labour must re-connect with working class supporters is about housing too. ‘Concerns about preferential access to housing — often false — built up because we refused to prioritise the building of new social housing. If we want to win back our lost support, this can no longer be a marginal issue.’