By Sheila Spencer, Secretary, Labour Housing Group
Take this with you on the doorstep! A handy guide to Labour’s manifesto housing pledges. 
LHG has produced a quick guide to the main manifesto promises for housing. Please share it round to all your Labour friends!
For a more easily printable version go to the doorstep guide on LHG website.
We couldn’t mention everything in this 1 page guide, but there’s something in our policies for everyone:
- young people stuck in private rented homes, paying exorbitant rents, having to move every 6 months or year, and facing landlords who don’t maintain their properties
- families moving from one private rented home to another, with no stability for their children and no hope of a secure, affordable, council or Housing Association home
- leaseholders having to pay through the nose for ground rents
- anyone facing homelessness
- people in high rise tower blocks worried about fire safety in their homes
- families who are anxious about where their children will be able to afford to live when they grow up
- first-time buyers wanting low cost homes so they can stay near their work and families
- those wanting to live in environmentally sustainable homes
We know that young people in particular are desperate for hope that the housing market can be made to work for them. We want to see the end of “young” people (under 35??) being forced to share flats and houses with people they don’t know, forced to move on a frequent basis, and facing huge battles to get decent living conditions. So when Labour gets into power, we’ll make all private tenancies indefinite ones as a matter of course (as they were before the Tories changed the rules in 1988). This won’t stop you agreeing a fixed term tenancy with your landlord – but you won’t any longer be forced into this.
No-fault evictions go out with this change too. And the 2019 Manifesto says that we’ll cap rent increases, bring in binding minimum standards, more money for enforcement, and funding for renters’ unions. The work of Acorn and Generation Rent can be replicated around the country, protecting tenants from the excesses of the worst landlords.
Other big stories are, of course, the pledge to build an average 100,000 council homes a year, the Green Deal which means retrofitting older homes can become a reality, and the pledge to reform leasehold.
My other favourites are getting rid of Bedroom Tax (alongside LHA caps, and reforming Universal Credit), ending the Right to Buy, and, of course, funding for fitting sprinklers and other fire safety measures in all high-rise council and housing association tower blocks. And if you’re on the doorstep and people ask how we can deliver all of this at once, tell them that the draft legislation to repeal the Bedroom Tax is already written so it will take only days to get this into force, once we are elected!
As the Labour Party says, Labour is on the side of the tenants. We need to broadcast this loud and clear for the next 2 weeks. Please help to get this message across!
One reply on “A handy guide to Labour’s manifesto housing pledges”
Reblogged this on Tory Britain!.