At #lab17, new policy on housing was passed, including most dramatically the promise to ballot existing tenants and leaseholders before destroying current social housing stock. The text of the motion, Composite 5, is posted below with a YouTube clip from Jeremy Corbyn’s Leaders speech in which he refers to the new policies..
Labour Party Conference 2017 Composite 5
We call upon Councils, in areas where the need for social housing exceeds supply, to meet that need by:
- directly delivering construction and maintenance services that can guarantee high quality council housing, with secure lifetime tenancies and genuinely affordable rent.
- ensuring a sustainable means of meeting their local housing need by retaining ownership and control of available public land.
- prioritise providing homes at social rents and to cease disposing or transferring of public land, council estates and commercial property for the benefit of private-sector housing and investment opportunities for the few.
- supporting and strengthening those communities that rely on social housing by requiring at least 1:1 replacement, within the same neighbourhood of council homes sold or demolished under regeneration schemes.
We call on Labour Party to:
- create a new department to tackle the housing crisis.
- reaffirm the vital importance of social housing in tackling the housing crisis.
- reconfirm the manifesto commitment to build at least 100,000 council and housing association homes for genuinely affordable rent or sale.
- prioritise brownfield sites for the building of new homes.
- pledge to ensure all new homes in the United Kingdom are built to the highest safety, environmental and construction standards.
- Support full binding – ballot rights for estate residents in any ongoing and future regeneration projects. This would follow a comprehensive programme which fully involves residents and their representatives in understanding the economic, social and environmental consequences of any proposals.
Jeremy Corbyn mentioned it in his Leader’s speech.
Labour’s Housing Policy