Labour pledges to go ‘net positive’ on social rent homes early in government

To do so, Mr Pennycook said that he would “repurpose the Affordable Homes Programme to direct it overwhelmingly toward the provision of social rented homes”.

“Enhanced compulsory powers” would make it “easier and cheaper” to deliver affordable housing, he said. Meanwhile, the “dramatically increased discounts” on the Right to Buy introduced in 2012 “cannot possibly be justified” and would be significantly reduced.

Mr Pennycook also said that Labour would scrap the government’s “complicated” plans for a new Infrastructure Levy to replace the existing Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy mechanisms.

He continued: “Alongside the introduction of strengthened protections for newly built social rented homes and the conclusive abandonment of the government’s flawed proposals to extend the Right to Buy to housing association tenants, we will seek to reduce the number of social homes sold off each year with a view to ensuring we go net positive on social housing numbers within the very early years of the next parliament.”

Asked after his speech whether this goal would be accompanied by targets for new social rent homes, he said: “At the point we either announce a target for overall affordable housing or metrics by which we will measure success. We want to make sure it stacks up, that we can absolutely deliver it, and we’re not in that position yet.”

Echoing Inside Housing’s Build Social campaign and the NHF’s call for a long-term plan for housing, Mr Pennycook said “we need to think over a 10-year period at least to turn things around”. 

Building 90,000 social rent homes a year, as these campaigns are asking for, would be challenging in five years, he said. 

He added: “We are in such a bad position of losing 14,000 social homes a year that the ability for the sector, working with government, to turn things around quickly in one parliament, and to reach a number of 90,000 social homes, I think is very stretching, incredibly stretching, and I’m not sure it can be done.”

However, he said: “Very early on in the next parliament we stop our stock being eroded… If we can go net positive very early on, alongside all the changes we’re going to make on land reform, CPO [compulsory purchase orders], planning reform, I think we can get numbers significantly up.”

Despite his desire to reduce the number of social rent homes sold off, the shadow minister said he would not introduce a moratorium on Right to Buy sales.

“What we’ve got to do is make it more difficult if you like… We’ve got to sort of turn the taps off and get back to the position where we were under the last Labour government which is, yes, a few thousand social homes will be sold off every year but we will be building many many more,” Mr Pennycook said.

Inside Housing’s Build Social campaign is calling on all political parties to commit to building 900,000 social rented homes in England over the next 10 years, with separate targets for other UK countries bringing the overall total to more than one million.