Hannah Spencer

Green MPs welcome the Bill as a step in the right direction—it includes important changes—but it does not match the scale of our housing crisis. It needs to be braver and bolder, and deliver the council homes that our communities desperately need. Social housing is not just a roof over someone’s head. It is the secure home they come back to after a long day; it is where their kids grow up and their grandkids come round. It means knowing their neighbours and having somewhere safe and secure to put down roots. That is the kind of security that everyone deserves. However, more than 1.3 million households are waiting for a social home, and more than 170,000 children are living in temporary accommodation. That statistic alone should shame us into action. Councils are giving millions of pounds to private landlords, and I see what the lack of council housing means for people in Gorton and Denton every single day. Across Manchester and Tameside, 3,180 households are in temporary accommodation, including 5,368 children. There are parents and four children, including twin babies with additional needs, squeezed into a two-bedroom home; a family of seven, including a child with a rare genetic disorder, are living in an overcrowded three-bedroom home; and a couple who have been on waiting lists for over 10 years, and are now approaching retirement, are terrified that they simply will not be able to afford their rent when they have to stop working. We need to do three things. The first is to stop selling off the homes that we already have. We need to abolish right to buy. The Bill makes it harder for homes to be sold off, but if more than a million households are waiting for a social home, how can we justify selling off any of them? That is not to criticise anyone who has bought their council home; those people are not to blame —the policy is. Scotland ended right to buy in 2016, and Wales has done the same; it is time for England to join them. Secondly, we need to build more social homes. After the second world war, councils built more than 120,000 social homes a year on average. We need that ambition again, because today, councils in England are building an average of just 1,320 social rent homes a year, and by my maths, that is an average of about four per constituency. When the Prime Minister was campaigning to be MP for Makerfield, he said that all of the £39 billion affordable housing fund should be dedicated to building council homes, but he has now backtracked on that. Why? We need to get building again, properly and at scale. Thirdly, we need to buy back the council housing stock. Green MPs are fully behind councils that are buying homes to bring them back into council housing. “Buy the supply” is an idea brilliantly championed by my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton Pavilion (Siân Berry). We need more of that. My message to the Government is simple: be braver, abolish right to buy, build social homes at scale, and do more of “buy the supply”.