Labour Party sets out housing policies at annual conference

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told the party's annual conference that housing policy was "a top priority" for the party. He said that a Labour government would invest "in council housing and for affordable homes to rent and to buy" and that ideas were required "to tackle land hoarding and land speculation".

In a report (46-page / 985 KB PDF) released on the second day of the conference, shadow housing and planning minister John Healey argued that a "substantial and sustained programme of public house building" was required to meet the country's demand for new housing. The report said affordable housing had been "overlooked and run down over the last three decades" and building homes that would be "affordable to future as well as current buyers" should be considered an investment rather than a subsidy.

The report said changes to government policy "could feasibly see the building of 100,000 affordable public homes" by 2020. It recommended that councils be given the freedom to borrow against their assets to invest in house building and that one-for-one replacement of council houses sold through the right-to-buy should be introduced.

It also recommended that obligations on developers to build social rented homes as a condition for receiving planning permission should be "tightened" and that a grant fund should be set up by the Homes and Communities Agency to enable councils to finance large-scale building projects.

The report claimed that a programme of public house building would effectively pay for itself over around 26 years, through reductions in the amount of housing benefits paid out to those unable to afford increased rents.

Healey also told the conference that Pete Redfern, chief executive of house building company Taylor Wimpey, had been appointed to lead an independent review into the root causes of the decline in home ownership in the UK. Healey said the review would report its findings in the summer of 2016.

Planning expert Lucy Close of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com said: "Housing is clearly something which Corbyn sees as a high priority issue in terms of domestic politics. His speech last week, however, does not add much, if anything, to the housing policy statement which he released in August during his leadership campaign. His speech at the annual conference discussed a number of recurring themes including reducing land banking and speculation, a new council house building programme and tightening obligations in relation to affordable homes."

"Corbyn did also remark that housing is a top legislative priority for the Labour party and so it will be interesting to see if and how these policies and views will affect the parliamentary debate on the Housing Bill later this year, and in particular the right to buy extension," Close said.