Jeremy Corbyn will announce the biggest council house building programme since the Second World War today as Labour pledges to spend £75 billion on affordable homes.
The party’s manifesto, which is being launched in Birmingham today, will include a commitment to build 100,000 council homes a year and 50,000 “genuinely affordable” homes.
Mr Corbyn will also promise to fix the housing crisis in England with the biggest programme to build affordable homes since the 1960s if Labour wins a majority in the December 12 election.
The party says that it will spend half of its £150 billion “social transformation fund” — borrowing that it would invest to repair the damage done by austerity — on house-building over five years. Mr Corbyn said: “Housing should be for the many, not a speculation opportunity for dodgy landlords and the wealthy few . . . I am determined to create a society where working-class communities and young people have access to affordable, good-quality council and social homes.”
Labour proposes to build 100,000 council homes a year by the end of its first parliament, which it says is an increase of more than 3,500 per cent compared with the Conservatives at present.
Official housing statistics have shown that more than a million households are on waiting lists for council housing.
A further 50,000 “genuinely affordable homes” would be built each year through housing associations by the end of the same period.
The building programme will take place only in England, as housing is a devolved matter.
Labour says that the council house programme is the biggest since the efforts to rebuild Britain after the war, and the largest commitment to build affordable housing since the 1960s.
The party also plans to scrap the Conservatives’ “bogus” definition of affordable housing and replace it with one that is linked to local incomes.
Furthermore, the homes would be built to green standards to tackle the climate crisis, using the much-praised Goldsmith Street council development in Norwich as an inspiration.
John Healey , the shadow housing secretary, said: “The next Labour government will kickstart a housing revolution with the biggest investment in new council and social homes this country has seen for decades.”
Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, described the plan as a “transformative programme” and said that the Labour Party would focus on brownfield sites.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, she said: “We’ve got to make sure that obviously brownfield is really important, we’ve got to get that land back up to scratch to make sure we can use that, and the public sector has a lot of land still that has not been utilised.
“To make sure that happens we’ll protect our greenbelts, because the important thing about our housebuilding programme is not just how many units we build but that actually we build communities again.”
Polly Neate, chief executive of the charity Shelter, said that the plan would be “transformational for housing in this country”. “A pledge to build social homes at this scale would, if implemented, do more than any other single measure to end the housing emergency and give new, affordable, safe homes to hundreds of thousands currently without one,” she said.
Kate Henderson, the National Housing Federation’s chief executive, added: “The housing crisis is having a disastrous effect on millions of people in England, and we need to build 145,000 social homes every year if we are to end it.”
However, Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, accused Labour of decimating social housing numbers during its previous goverment.
“This is why we’ve committed £9 billion to deliver a further 250,000 more affordable new homes — helping thousands more onto the property ladder,” he said. “Under the Conservatives we’ve delivered 450,000 new affordable homes, increased housing supply to its highest level for almost 30 years and increased housebuilding by 93 per cent in the last six years.”
