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‘I wasn’t bold enough on social housing,’ says Miliband
Former Labour leader Ed Miliband has admitted he was “not bold enough” on social housing in his failed 2015 election campaign.
The Doncaster North MP was speaking today at the launch of a landmark report from a commission set up by housing charity Shelter, which calls for 3.1 million new social homes to be built over the next 20 years.
Mr Miliband was one of Shelter’s 16 commissioners, alongside former Conservative cabinet ministers Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and Lord Jim O’Neill.
Mr Miliband’s election manifesto made no mention of social housing, and Baroness Warsi and Lord O’Neill were part of the first governments not to commit a penny for social rented housing since the World War II.
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In response to a question from Inside Housing at the event, Mr Miliband said: “Let me just acknowledge: absolutely I wasn’t bold enough in 2015 when it came to social housing, of course I wasn’t.
“I mean, that’s why I’m here today, out of recognition that we need to be bolder as a country, that all political parties haven’t been bold enough, Labour and Conservative.
“That’s why I’m saying that over the past 30 or 40 years I’m afraid it’s been a massive failure of public policy, and that’s what’s got to change.”
He denied that his manifesto did not mention social housing. The 58-page document, which is still available online, does not contain the phrase, nor does it mention social rent or set a target for affordable homes.
Mr Miliband did pledge 200,000 homes of all tenures a year and three-year tenancies for private renters.
Baroness Warsi said: “I stood up and said I changed my mind on lots of things during this report and I think we should – at a time when often politics can be quite toxic – be quite positive when politicians say that ‘I changed my mind on this because I think there’s a different way of doing things’.”
Lord O’Neill said his only purpose in government was to help set up the Northern Powerhouse and boost regional productivity, but that he “tried to push that prime minister and my boss the chancellor that we should actually use devolution agreements as a way of breaking down the national policy and allowing for social housing in those areas”.
The Shelter report also calls for a new regulator to police standards in the social and private sectors and a body to give tenants representation at a national level.
