Rebecca Long Bailey

In Salford, around 3,500 applicants are on the housing waiting list, with 1,335 children living in temporary accommodation. Across England, more than 1.3 million households are waiting for a social home, but at the current rate of delivery, Shelter estimates that it would take 119 years to clear the waiting lists. The crisis did not happen overnight, and it was not inevitable. We did not suddenly discover that council housing did not work; previous Governments sold it off. They stopped building it, cut the funding and hollowed out the housing departments that had given local government the skills, capacity and ability to build at scale. In their place, we became increasingly dependent on a private housing market whose primary purpose has always been to generate returns, so it is no surprise that the market did not deliver the social homes that we needed—it was never going to do that. That is why I really welcome the measures in the Bill to protect existing social housing, particularly the reforms to right to buy, but it is only the first part of the story. We now need to build council houses at scale and to give councils the powers, funding and confidence to do it. We know it can be done, because in the greatest city on earth, Salford, we have already shown how to do it. In 2017, Paul Dennett and Salford city council established Dérive, a council-owned housing company that was created to develop land and increase the supply of council and genuinely affordable homes. The first homes were delivered in 2019, and 513 had been built by April this year, with another 700 in construction or development. That is public ownership in practice, and it is particularly significant because much of this happened during austerity, when councils were on their knees. We used our land, our democratic mandate and our own housing company to rebuild the capacity that successive Governments had allowed to disappear, and we did it on a shoestring. Imagine what could be achieved with Government support! That is the lesson that I want the House to take from Salford: councils can acquire land, develop it and build high-quality, energy-efficient homes, but crucially, they can retain those homes as public assets for generations to come. I very much welcome the Government’s ambition to put councils back at the heart of house building, including the £39 billion affordable housing programme and the commitment to a major expansion in council house building, but if we are serious about delivering that ambition, we need to see the detail that will make it real—not in 10 years’ time, but now. How many of those homes will actually be owned by councils? How much funding will go directly to local authorities? Will councils have the borrowing capacity that they need to deliver, and will grant rates make genuinely social rent homes financially viable? Finally, we have to be honest about what we mean by affordable. A home does not become affordable simply because we put the word “affordable” in front of it. For a family on a low wage, 80% of an inflated market rent can still be completely unaffordable. Social rent has to be different, because it is designed for what people can genuinely afford. We have to invest in council house building and make that a central pillar of our industrial strategy. There has been lots of talk this week about crowding in private investment, but that will happen only if the Government set the strategic direction and put the funding on the table for councils to deliver.