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Nandy: Labour will ‘put social housing at the heart of plans to jump-start housebuilding’
The Labour Party will deliver “a refreshed model” that will “put social and genuinely affordable housing at the very heart of our plans to jump-start the housebuilding industry”, the shadow housing secretary will say at the Housing 2023 conference.
Lisa Nandy will use her speech at the Housing 2023 conference tomorrow to warn that housebuilding is set to fall to its lowest level since World War II, with a £17bn cost to the UK economy.
She will say a Labour government would take a different approach by reintroducing local targets, which the Conservatives scrapped in December.
“The decision to abandon them this year was the very definition of political cowardice, weakness in the face of backbench hostility,” she will say.
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She will also promise to “be honest about [what] the green belt is and isn’t”.
“We will release poor-quality ex-industrial land and dilapidated, neglected scrubland to build more housing,” she will say.
The green belt is a planning designation for land around big cities where new development is restricted to curtail urban sprawl.
It is often misunderstood to mean greenfield – undeveloped natural or agricultural land – when, in fact, it contains large amounts of underused industrial land.
She will also repeat existing Labour Party policy pledges to give first-time buyers “first dibs” on new homes, and to give local authorities new powers to compulsorily purchase land without ‘hope value’. This means they could obtain it more cheaply for housing development.
Her speech, which was pre-released to the media, contained no further detail on how the party will “put social and genuinely affordable housing at the very heart of our plans to jump-start the housebuilding industry”.
The party has previously committed to a target to make social housing the second-largest housing tenure. Such a move would require making up a deficit on the private rented sector of around 300,000 homes.
There was no mention of this in the pre-released lines, but a Labour Party source confirmed to Inside Housing that it remains committed to the policy.
Ms Nandy will also use the speech to hit out at left-wing critics who have condemned the focus on homeownership in the party’s housing policy in recent months.
“I was astonished by the reaction of some people in my own party, that this is ‘Tory-lite’,” she will say.
“To those people I say, you couldn’t be more wrong… If you want people to have real resilience in their lives, [they need access to the assets] that sustain them…
“And you need common assets, like council housing, which provides a secure home for life, handed back, to be used for the next generations.”
Ms Nandy will argue for more partnerships with long-term investors, pointing to the “private patient capital ready to be unleashed”. She believes the existing consensus “that treated social justice and growth as opposing objectives” are “false choices, and we reject [them].”
