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In a wide-ranging interview at last week’s Housing 2019 conference, Mr Healey also spoke of plans to redefine affordable housing and warned that the government had been too slow to “grasp” the scale of the problem with the cladding of high rise buildings in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire.
The south Yorkshire MP was housing minister from 2009 to 2010. However, despite pledging £4bn a year of housing grants to stimulate the “biggest council housing programme in the last 40 years” he said recent calls to build 1.45 million social rented and shared ownership homes over the next ten years was unrealistic.
The call from the National Housing Federation, which was endorsed by Shelter and the Chartered Institute of Housing, also stated that the government must invest £12.8bn a year.
Mr Healey said: “I don’t think the NHF could cope with a ten-fold increase in housing budget next year,” he said. “We won’t get from 6,434 socially rented homes to 145,000 a year overnight…we need departmental changes in policy.”
Mr Healey said he believes that most councils currently lack the frontline staff to deliver and run such a large number of council homes.
“I am not going to promise to people changes I don’t believe we can deliver. It’s got to be a combination of the radical and the credible,” he added.
Labour would also prevent “the haemorrhaging of social rented homes” by scrapping the right to buy scheme – but would also support first time buyers in other ways through a new type of new low cost home to buy, ‘first buy’, where average mortgage costs would be linked to a third of average local incomes.
He said: “It’s no good simply building more market priced homes either to rent or to buy, because you only influence the cost and help to deal with the cost of housing crisis in the very long run. If we want homes to be more affordable, we have to build more affordable homes.”
Mr Healey explained that Labour would scrap the Conservative definition of ’affordable’ homes, which is linked to market rents and which he claims is “way beyond many people’s means”, and establish a new definition linked to local incomes.
Councils would be “at the heart” of Labour’s campaign to build over a million new “truly affordable” homes a year across the entire country, he said.
“There is no area where there is no need for more affordable housing. We would expect every council in every area to play a part in building and commissioning the homes that were needed,” he said. “It would add up to the biggest council housing programme in the last 40 years.”
To achieve this end, Labour will make £4bn a year available in housing grants – but central government funding would only be part of the picture. “We will get more from commercial housebuilders, more through the planning system through investments there, and we’ll give councils and housing associations a freer hand – more powers to build in the borough to build for themselves.”
Mr Healey said that he believes a hard Brexit will hit the housebuilding industry, “as it would hit the wider economy, certainly”, but believes the bigger challenge is a long term one. “Irrespective of Brexit, there is big investment available for housing and construction. And if we get the policy and fiscal government framework right, we can get that into British housing to help the need, and councils will play for me a big part in helping to do that.”
Two years after the Grenfell fire, Mr Healey said he gives credit to housing and communities secretary James Brokenshire in his response to the tragedy, but also described the government’s banning of combustible cladding as “baby steps”.
“Government has been too slow to grasp the depth and breadth of public need to fix this. Survivors were told they would all have a home within one year. There has been a failure to reclad high-rise blocks – nine out of ten have not been replaced. Seventy of those block owners don’t even have a plan to do work.”
The Labour party has faced a backlash from some of the business community for its plans to nationalise energy, rail and water industries and Royal Mail, but the party would not nationalise housing associations, Mr Healey confirmed.
When asked how he felt about the increasing commercialisation of councils, Mr Healey pointed out that in a previous role as local government minister from 2007 to 2009, he had “strongly encouraged the strengthening of councils trading powers”.
“I wanted to see them act in an enterprising way, but never wanted to see them lose their public service ethos,” he said. “It’s making sure that that balance gives the distinctive hallmark of local government for me. I wouldn’t stop them from commercialising.
“But the concern now that the commercial pressures in the face of deep funding cuts from government is leading to decisions that don’t keep that balance between the public interest and the private gain.”
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