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A big ask and no answers

One traditional feature of housing’s annual trip to Harrogate for the Chartered Institute of Housing Conference – apart that is from the disco – is a ministerial speech.  These are often disappointing, over the last 20 years or so most of them have started “I’m new in the job, housing is really important, I have come here to listen and learn.”
This year, as an interesting variation, the Minister listened to a speech instead of delivering one.  And in the middle of her remarks, the estimable chief of the CIH Sarah Webb summed it all up in a simple sentence.  She said to Grant Shapps:

“I’m asking you to resist those small, popularist issues at the extreme ends of the debate and prioritise the really big ones – the demographic time bomb, persistent unaffordability, land supply, the complex role housing plays in our economy; ways to lever in new investment to fund new supply.”

Never one to face up to such fundamentals, Grant Shapps had his own diversionary tactic in place.  This time it was his announcement on transparency: the Ministry of Justice will consult on making housing associations subject to the Freedom of Information Act and he wants all associations to publish all spending over £500.
Now, on the specific issue of FoI, I agree with the government, and I can’t for a moment understand why the sector doesn’t just embrace it and move on.  Instead, his announcement seems to have succeeded in getting the housing association sector hot under the collar on a less than critical matter, which I suspect was the aim.
I bet he had a chuckle that his diversion worked.  It’s certainly a lot easier than addressing Sarah Webb’s little list of really big questions.

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On yer bus

Rarely have I been less impressed by a minister than when I saw Lord Freud speak last week at the Chartered Institute of Housing Conference. It was a virtuoso performance of refusing to engage with any of the issues, however reasonably raised, all to the end of irritating a room full of people. He’d have been as well to stay in Whitehall.
He did however (accidentally I’m sure) stray into making a couple of relevant comments. We have constantly heard from Shapps et al that everyone is being ridiculous saying that the poor will be pushed out of expensive parts of London. Lord Freud took a different tack when questioned. London is a city of commuters he told us. It’s highly inter-connected. You can get around easily and cheaply. A bus fare is only £1.30 and – by the way – he often gets the bus. The average London commute is 68 minutes. Why should people in social housing get special privileges to be able to live next to their jobs?
In making this argument he acknowledges that the government is fully aware that people will stop being able to afford to live in large parts of London. It’ll be a price worth paying to get the benefit bill down and what we heard from Lord Freud was their rationalisation for why that was OK.
Second thing of interest was the staggeringly disingenuous argument that the welfare reforms were being driven by the need to support people into work, and not the reduction of the benefit bill. Frankly, it’s insulting people’s intelligence to tell them the removal of £18bn in a side effect of helping people into work.
He told the audience that the reason for reducing people’s benefit in the private rented sector is to put people in cheaper homes and keep people out of the benefits trap. He correctly said that benefits allowed people to afford very high rents which meant that some families never had a realistic chance of earning enough to pay their rent without housing benefit.
What is remarkable about this argument is they are duplicating exactly this problem through the ‘affordable rent’ model. They are raising rents in social housing to near-market levels where workless and low earning families are unlikely to ever earn enough to pay the rents without benefit. Ministerial double-think at its worst.
As I’ve said frequently on this blog and elsewhere –rent that people can afford from their own means supports aspiration and employment. Low rents keep people out of the benefits system and means they keep any extra money they earn – from overtime, promotions or someone else in the house getting a job.
The fact that the Tories don’t recognise this is the giveaway that it’s cuts and adherence to the market that drives their approach – regardless of the consequences on employment.

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The Future of Social Housing – Is Newham’s answer THE answer?

Our special correspondent, Bill D’Amore, has been at the Chartered Institute of Housing Conference this week, and was moved to write this post.
The Mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales, spoke at Wednesday’s session of the Chartered Institute of Housing conference and set out his – and Newham’s – stall for social housing that builds resilience, aspiration and fairness for residents and communities. Sir Robin is one of Labour’s most outspoken politians calling for an end  to what he has called ‘the race to the bottom’. The social housing and benefit system has created a ghetto that makes the poor poorer and creates a culture of dependency, excluding people from work. Never avoiding controversy, Robin is a stalwart champion of his part of East London, and for what  his community needs:  robust access to employment, strong place-making, and prioritising social rented housing to those in work to “stop Newham’s revolving door”.
Robin’s position has been well known for some time, but he has courted particular interest because he tries to set out the socialist case for change – and a role for social housing that is, to some, not a million miles from Conservative boroughs like Hammersmith and Fulham and Westminster. He argues that  it isn’t – precisely because Newham has some of the most deprived communities in Britain that need stability and resilience, whereas other affluent Tory councils are actively excluding the poorest in areas where they work and live. Robin’s argument is both moral and economic. As he said: ”driving people out of rich areas seems to me to be just plain nuts”.
So far so plausible, to this party member, but as coalition policy starts to ramp up a vision for social housing as merely a short term  safety net ( as articulated on Wednesday by Matt Oakley from Policy Exchange)it’s important that Robin – and others – sharpen up their argument for a Labour housing policy that doesn’t just leave an open goal to the Tories. As I listened, three political challenges seemed imminent:
1) Some of us, Robin included, seem to have adopted the Tory narrative of the dependency culture, and invidious insinuations, denied by IDS but run week-in, week-out in the Mail and Express, that those in social housing are scroungers and the ‘feckless poor’.  I do not think Robin believes this, but we need a consistent challenge to this narrative – the Hill’s report did not draw this conclusion, and indeed other evidence suggests that the barriers to work are 80% circumstance / capability and 20% motivation, not the other way around. The third speaker on Wednesday, Diane Lee, tenant chair of Watford Community Housing Trust, gained the loudest applause of the session went she expressed just how much tenants resent this suggestion.
2) I am not sure Robin’s analysis does always lead to the need for social  lettings solely to those in work. As he says, the social tenants in Newham are the most stable, whilst it’s the private rented sector that sees the lowest standards and highest churn. What Newham, and places like it, may need is a far more robust set of tools to intervene in the private rented sector (PRS). What he can most readily influence is the easy option of his own lettings policy. To be fair, Robin does talk about the PRS, but only in terms of small pilots, and this part of the housing sector repeatedly never gets the attention in Labour policy that it ought to.
3) Most critically, Robin is always stuck within the localist position. If Newham can change its lettings policy to only allocate to working families, how can these flexibilities be denied to Hammersmith and Fulham? This is where we need the clearest thinking.  If ordinary working families are not to be driven into overcrowded slums or out of vast swathes of London and the South East, we need a policy that does not just help Newham, but all of the South East. The answer has to be one, or possibly both, of two possibilities:  in some way, a prescribed minimum tenure mix – a limit at the edge of localism however much local communities may squeal; or, some form of positive incentives to encourage genuinely mixed communities (and not merely the desultory bribe of the new homes bonus).
Neither of these will be simple, or uncontroversial, but our best advocates – like Sir Robin, and Labour’s national housing policy need to get passionately behind the reasons why we value mixed communities, whether of race, faith or economic circumstance, and a serious set of policy tools to achieve this. For Newham’s sake, and the rest of us.
Bill D’Amore.

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Runaway Cameron should be stigmatised too

Lone parents make up around 10% of households in this country.  Demonised in the media as responsible for many of society’s ills including the breakdown in law and order, the facts do not fit the stereotype of teenage girls in a feral underclass getting pregnant and taking all the social housing.  Divorce and separation are the real factors behind the growth in numbers. 
People take different views on David Cameron’s call that ‘runaway dads’ should be ‘stigmatised’ in the same way as drink-drivers and face ‘the full force of shame’, but a new report from the Fawcett Society prepared by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that lone parents are being hit hardest by the government’s cuts.  Lone parents may, as Cameron said, be doing ‘a heroic job against the odds’ but he is stacking the odds against them in a highly damaging way.  Far from being the father of the nation, Cameron is the nearest political equivalent to the runaway dad.
The report shows that lone parents, 92% of whom are women, are suffering the greatest cumulative loss as a result of the cuts in public services.  Reductions in housing benefit are a major factor as single women are particularly reliant on HB either because they do not work or because they are in casual or part-time work and rely on HB as an in-work benefit.  
Lone parents will come under increasing pressure to work – the expectation that they will work will shortly be reduced to those with children over 5 – just as rents are rising, housing benefit is being cut, working tax credit coverage of child care costs is being reduced.  Lack of childcare is already a particular barrier to lone parents wishing to work. As the report states: “At the same time as the coalition government introduces wide-scale welfare reform with the intention of “making work pay”, they are reducing the level of support for childcare and training costs that help lone parents into work.”
The report highlights the contradictions in government policy and how cutting the deficit is a much higher priority than other objectives such as helping people into work or improving educational attainment.  The contradiction in policy says Fawcett “fails to recognize the needs, interests and circumstances of the diverse women who fall into each group and risks reinforcing outdated stereotypes and penalizing those who do not conform to them.”  Quite.

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How come Scotland can build council houses then?

Monimbo
Peter Hetherington writes in the Guardian that more than faith is needed to build council houses, and asks why Scotland manages to build almost as many as England when its housing market is a tenth of the size of its southern neighbour?
The reasons are set out in today’s UK Housing Review Briefing, which updates many of the figures in the annual publication and draws attention to recent trends. One of these is that the 32 councils in Scotland built over a thousand houses last year, and may well build the same number or more this year, while English council house building will probably peak at only a little higher than this, before heading back to the miserable output levels of 2-3 years ago.
So why is this? It turns out that the answer is in the spending rules. Scottish councils have several big advantages over their English cousins.
First, they’ve had local control of council housing finances for years, for the simple reason that Scotland stopped subsidising council housing revenue accounts and so the ridiculous ‘HRA subsidy’ system which is in its last year of operation south of the border fell into disuse in Scotland many years ago.
Second, they have had no rents policy for council housing, which may have been an oversight but has had the happy side-effect of low rents which councils can now raise – if they choose to – to pay for new investment.
And third, a quirk in the spending formula by which the Treasury controls Holyrood means that any extra borrowing is counted as what’s called ‘Annual Managed  Expenditure’ (AME) rather than the more tightly controlled Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL). In England and Wales, the opposite applies.
Even more surprisingly, councils are predicted to soon have the same building potential as Scottish housing associations. This is, of course, because their borrowing is cheaper than new borrowing by associations. It’s counted as public borrowing, though, which doesn’t worry Holyrood but might one day trouble the Treasury if volumes are perceived to get too high.
Even after council housing finance reform in England in April next year, councils will still be restricted in what they can do and won’t be able to emulate Scotland. In theory, English councils can also borrow prudentially, but HM Treasury is placing a cap on their borrowing from April onwards so they won’t be able to use this freedom to the extent they could support from their income. Some will continue building, but most won’t be able to do so on any scale.
There’s a sting in this tale, of course: someone is paying for the new houses and while there is a grant system in Scotland part of the cost falls on rents. So existing tenants are partly paying for the new homes. However, so far there has been no suggestion that Scotland follows England in jacking rents up to 80 per cent of market levels – or anywhere near them. So the pain is probably tolerable and councils must judge that they have tenants on their side.
The odd thing is that it’s in England rather than Scotland that the government is making a big fuss about cutting red tape and freeing up councils to do more. Looking north of the border might be a bit unpalatable since May’s elections, but even so the English housing minister could take a leaf out of Scotland’s spending rulebook.

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Looking forward: housing policies for the future in Newcastle and Tyneside

Labour Housing Group members in Newcastle have organised a discussion ‘Looking forward: housing policies for the future’ on Tuesday 21st June 2011 at 7.30pm at Civic Centre, Newcastle.  If you are interested in attending please contact Sheila Spencer at [email protected]
Now that Labour has taken back control of the City Council, what should our detailed housing policies be? What are the key problems we need to solve, and what are the most urgent tasks for our new Cabinet? How can we best meet housing need and avert the housing crisis being brought about by the policies of the Tory-led Coalition Government? What do we need to do differently, either from the Lib Dem Council or from our own last period in office?
This meeting will provide a chance to discuss our policy direction with Cllr Helen McStravick, the Deputy Cabinet Member for Housing, and with Steve Hilditch.  
Key questions we might discuss at the meeting include:
How can we build more houses, not just for owner-occupiers but social housing for people who want to rent as well?
What should our stance be on flexible tenures being introduced by the Government?
How do we maintain the progress that has been made on tackling and preventing homelessness, particularly in the light of the current welfare “reforms”?
What role should we expect Your Homes Newcastle to play in the future, not just as a provider but as a developer and more?
How can we ensure there is money to fund refurbishment of houses and flats, and avoid the planned demolition of much-needed housing?
How can we marry up regeneration and housing policies rather better?
What needs to be done about the Private Rented Sector to ensure better quality of stock and management, better access to the sector for households in need, and better linkage with other sectors?
What should our policies towards student housing be?
What do we need to do to reduce numbers of empty properties?
How can we work more effectively with housing providers (housing associations and others)?
How should the Council be engaging with tenants?
What could we do to campaign against the worst of the Government’s housing policies, and to campaign for positive change?
These and other discussion points could help us to shape a response to the Labour Party’s Housing Review as well as help to inform the policies of the City Council.
The meeting will also serve as an inaugural meeting of a Tyneside group of the Labour Housing Group.
If you are interested in attending the meeting, please contact Sheila Spencer    [email protected]    or    0191 265 2425

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You can’t defeat stereotypes by repeating stereotypes

I think Labour has got into a bad place on welfare reform.  It’s not just since Ed Miliband became Leader, it developed during the Labour years in government.  I think it is driven by the overwhelming dominance of the Daily Mail agenda of wild exaggeration about benefit cheats and scroungers and how this feeds into opinion polls.  We have not found a way to counter the hugely successful tactics of the right in turning public anger about failing economic performance into hostility against the poor and not the rich.  Why is the country not up in arms against the bankers and the mega-rich – the people who run the system, benefit most from the system, who have lined their pockets in the most extraordinary way over the past decade and failed everyone else whilst they were doing it?  
On Monday former political advisor to Tony Blair John McTernan was on Daily Politics.  Commenting on Ed Miliband’s speech, he said that the Leader was ‘missing symbolic policies that indicate which side he’s on’, adding: ‘If he’s serious about saying if you get a job you should be looked at more seriously for council housing rather than simply council housing being for welfare recipients, I think that’s a big signal, it’s a signal that if you get on, if you better yourself, the state will be behind you, I think that’s a much more powerful signal than anything he’s said on policy before.’  
This repeats a myth about council housing, which isn’t and never has been (but will be if Shapps gets his way) allocated according to income or employment status but according to defined housing need, it fails to acknowledge why most people receive benefits (unemployment, illness, disability, retirement) or to explain why they are somehow undeserving of a home.  It accepts the ‘welfare recipient’ stigmatisation in its entirety.  Like the use of the term ‘lifetime tenancy’ when there is no such thing, the term ‘welfare recipient’ carries a package of prejudices and negative images, and has become a classic stereotype.  Even Andrew Neil seemed pleased with this contribution.
Ed Miliband’s speech was more balanced than the spin suggested, as Tony described in his earlier post, but it’s the spin that bothers me.  He accepted that there was a ‘terrible shortage’ of social housing and that ‘it will be a key test of the next Labour government that we address this issue’.  But the sterotype still crept in a roundabout way.  ‘People who give something back to their communities – for example people who volunteer or who work’ should be given higher priority in allocations.  But it seems to me to accept the media presumption about who lives in social housing and that there is something deficient about them compared to those that ‘give something back’. 
More than half of social tenants are retired or economically inactive for reasons other than unemployment.  Of the remainder, the vast majority are actually in work or full time education.  People entering social housing are often enabled to work for the first time because rents are affordable and the transition to in-work housing benefit is managed better.  The level of volunteering on some social housing estates is extraordinary, something we should celebrate, they put Cameron’s prissy big society full of lady bountifuls to shame.  The vast majority of tenants are already ‘responsible’ just like the vast majority of home owners and private tenants are. 
Ed makes the point that he wants to reward contribution and not punish people.  But there is shortage and the people who get punished are those that won’t get a home as a result of a change in priorities – your grannie who needs sheltered housing, your cousin with a severe medical condition who can’t stay in a private bedsit in a shared house, your son or daughter who has had a breakdown and needs supported housing, your sister with 3 kids evicted from her home because she can’t keep up with the mortgage.  None of them working and none of them able to volunteer.  These are not tearjerkers, this is the real life business of allocating social housing. 
John McTernan rightly said that Labour can’t win unless it is seen to represent a wider coalition of people.  I am less sure about his view that we were seen as the party of lone parents and immigrants (lone parents and immigrants won’t agree).  I think Labour came to be despised by a lot of natural supporters because of Iraq and because of Labour’s association with the rich – not the poor.  We no longer looked like the party of ordinary Britain.  The parties on yachts in the Med, the moth-like fascination with the wealthy, our soft line on the bankers and the undeserving rich.  Not forgetting the mad in-fighting which diverted the government from the ordinary issues facing people. 
We fall into the hands of the forces of darkness every time we play the undeserving poor game, every time we add to the negativity around ‘welfare recipients’ without explaining who they are.  Every time we fail to challenge the belief that ‘the housing benefit bill was out of control’ rather than point out that rents have gone up and caseload has increased due to the resurgence of the private rented sector.  If, as John McTernan seemed to me to be saying, you can only get the middle class on board by dumping on the poor, then the game is up for the left and every variety within it.  But if he meant it when he said that we need to have policies attractive to people in the middle as well as at the bottom, then there is enough common ground to unite us all.  Because Labour should be on the side of both.

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Health and Housing – why we need to recognise the links

Labour Housing Group and Socialist Health Association held a conference ‘Prescription for a healthy Britain’ on Monday 13 June.  Conference papers are available on the LHG website here.  In a guest post, LHG Vice chair Marianne Hood picks up the conference theme.
Despite the fact that the links between health and housing have been recognised for well over 100 years, and despite over a century of public health and housing interventions, we still have people with the worst health living in the worst housing.
The original impetus in the 19th century for improving housing conditions (for example slum clearance to tackle squalid living conditions, severe overcrowding and dilapidation) was clearly focussed on improving health outcomes. Sadly, in the 20th century the focus shifted to issues of ownership, access, management and cost – losing the link between improving housing to improve both mental and physical health.
Now in the 21st century many of the policies being driven forward by the Tory-led coalition risk returning us to that early 19th century situation with severe overcrowding and the poorest and most vulnerable people being driven into the poorest homes in an unregulated private sector. Make no mistake, there is a wealth of evidence to show that the private sector, especially the private rented sector, contains the highest proportion of ‘non-decent’ homes with a significant percentage of older people living in the very poorest private sector homes.
If investment in housing is not substantially increased, much of the expenditure on health and care programmes will be totally ineffective. In a report commissioned specially for the LHG/SHA Conference earlier this week, environmental health expert Stephen Battersby* reminded us that poor housing conditions cost the NHS at least £600 million per year, that the one-off costs of works to improve private rented housing gave an annual financial saving to the health sector, and that every £1 spent on providing housing support for vulnerable people can save nearly £2 in reduced costs of health services, tenancy failure, crime and residential care.  
The Labour Housing Group believes that housing should be recognised as a community capital asset that needs to be properly maintained, most of our current housing will still be here in a hundred years time, because if it is neglected the cost of demolition and replacement will ultimately fall on the state.
Surely we owe it to current generations, and to our children and our children’s children, to have good housing and health policies fit for the 21st century? Policies that recognise that investment in housing is an essential prerequisite for tackling inequality overall but especially health inequalities.
 *University of Surrey and University of Warwick, current President of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health.

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Ed's got it right on responsibility and housing

I liked Ed Miliband’s speech today. Responsibility, reward for contributing to society, reciprocity and ‘doing your bit’ have always been part of the Labour tradition and it’s good to hear the Labour leader putting it to the fore. For too long it’s been territory we surrendered too easily to the Tories. A
nd, it’s right for Ed to draw the dividing line between us and the Tories: Labour believes everyone has responsibilities, at the top and the bottom. The Tories however care a lot about benefit cheats, but have little to say on the spiralling pay of Britain’s wealth-wrecking bankers and chief executives.
His decision to draw on housing as an example was good too. If we are to maintain the legitimacy of public housing, it needs to be a more universal good – available to support working people on a range of incomes. If it becomes housing of the last resort and for the poorest only, the political argument to sustain it becomes ever harder.
It’s the same argument for the Labour Party really: at the last election, as Ed says, we became seen as the party for those on benefits and out of work – the social housing position on the political landscape. It’s hard to sustain a political party on that basis. For legitimacy, you have to make a universal offer that the majority can buy into – the NHS position on the political landscape.
Ed’s argument would see Labour move away from a position which privileged need as the main factor in getting social housing to a system where people’s contributions through work, caring, responsible behaviour were recognised in getting public help with your housing.
As readers of this blog will know – this isn’t a problem free, ‘motherhood and apple pie’ policy – it has tough consequences. There is only so much housing and the more you allocate on a contributory principle, the less there is for those in need, for whom alternative provision will need to be made.
However, I think that passes the public’s fairness test and provides a future Labour government with a strong foundation to invest in social housing and make the case for why.
The choice isn’t between social housing for the working versus social housing for the poorest, but social housing as a more universal offer, or no social housing for anyone.

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Housing policy will lead the way for Labour, says Livingstone

Labour’s housing policy will help lead the country out of the ‘turgid economic trough’ being created by the Tories, Ken Livingstone told a packed London Labour Housing Group conference on Saturday.  ‘Investment to create 100,000 new homes would create three-quarters of a million jobs’ the mayoral candidate told the conference, called to debate housing policies for London to be included in next year’s manifesto. 
Describing the fight for the mayoralty as a ‘mid-term election’ Ken argued that Labour needed to redefine housing policy as a key part of economic policy as well as being important in itself in meeting the housing needs of low and middle income Londoners.  One of the jobs of the new mayor will be to draw up a major programme of housebuilding ready for the return of a Labour government. 
The Tories have abandoned the idea of mixed communities in London, he said, but Labour will always build a mix of homes for a mix of people on a wide range of incomes, just as it had done in the past.  Ken also reminded the conference that effective campaigns on housing had forced major u-turns from both the Heath and Thatcher governments and could do so again with the coalition. 
Karen Buck MP, shadow minister for welfare reform, told the conference that the Tory government’s policies in the Localism and Welfare Reform Bills would have a huge impact on London and could force tens of thousands of people to move – all searching for cheaper areas.  The policies would also be counter-productive – leading to higher rents in all tenures and far greater homelessness – making it impossible for them to make their savings.
Karen said that the policies directly contradicted the Tories’ claim that they wanted to incentivise people to get back to work.  They had almost completely forgotten that housing benefit is also an in-work benefit  – over 40% of people receiving local housing allowance were in work in some boroughs – the losses would make it impossible for many of them to remain in work. 
Setting the context for the conference, Nicky Gavron AM, Labour’s housing and planning lead on the London Assembly, said that more and more people were seeing housing as a key battleground for the mayoral election.  The difference between the two mayors could not be more stark.  Ken’s legacy was strong, Nicky argued.  There was a strong planning framework, the best housing record since the 1970s, the highest level of capital investment ever and a massive land bank ready for development.  Johnson had squandered this inheritance and virtually all his housing claims could be dated back to Ken’s administration.  He was undermining the planning system, scrapping Ken’s targets especially the 50% affordable target and the emphasis on social rented homes.  The government’s own inspector had criticised Johnson’s polices, saying his targets were too low, he should keep the 50% London-wide affordable housing target, and should support social rented housing provision.  Johnson caved in to his Tory friends in the boroughs, allowing them to cut affordable housing.  Only the Labour boroughs are keeping London’s affordable housebuilding going. 
The conference, with representatives from all areas of London, inner and outer, debated a series of detailed policy proposals for the manifesto, including policies to increase housing supply, to meet the needs of the poorest and most socially excluded households, to help the ‘squeezed middle’, and to guarantee the future of social housing in the capital.  The policies will be developed further before the manifesto is published.   
Labour Party members interested in joining the Labour Housing Group should follow this link.  London members interested in the work of London LHG should contact [email protected]