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Corbyn announces social housing review
Jeremy Corbyn has used his leader’s speech at this year’s Labour Party conference to launch a party review into social housing policy.
Speaking at the end of the conference in Brighton, Mr Corbyn used a lengthy section of his speech to discuss social housing, announcing a review “of social housing policy – its building, planning, regulation and management”.
He said Labour would speak to social housing tenants all over the country and bring forward “a radical programme of action” in time for next year’s Labour conference.
Last week the government announced a social housing green paper.
Mr Corbyn came out in support of rent controls, noting that “the younger generations’ housing costs are three times more than those of their grandparents”.
The 2017 Labour manifesto proposed introducing an inflation cap on rent increases, and Inside Housing has asked whether this latest announcement represents a change in policy.
In the speech, Mr Corbyn gave his strongest criticism yet of “social cleansing”. He backed yesterday’s vote at the conference for compulsory, binding ballots by residents before regeneration can go ahead, adding: “Regeneration under a Labour government will be for the benefit of the local people, not private developers, not property speculators.
“People who live on an estate that’s redeveloped must get a home on the same site and on the same terms as before. No social cleansing, no jacking up rents, no exorbitant ground rents.”
This goes further than the Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who in his draft estate regeneration guidelines said tenants should be offered the right to return to “suitable homes with the same or similar rents”.
The Labour leader also attacked the government over the fire at Grenfell Tower, which killed at least 80 people in June.
He said: “Now that degraded regime has a tragic monument – the chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower, a horrifying fire in which dozens perished and an entirely avoidable human disaster.”
He called the fire an indictment of “decades of housing policies and privatisation and the yawning inequality in one of the wealthiest boroughs and cities in the world”.
