Pages 14-15 of the Little Book:
Labour’s pledge to build 1.5 million homes in five years is a pipe dream. Nothing Govt is saying about planning reform or prioritising affordable housing is going to shift the dial in a meaningful way for as long as marketisation is the prevailing model of delivery.
Worse, the planning reform championed by Labour risks destroying years of hard gained environmental protections, while the party’s determination to use productive farmland for solar farms will blight rural landscapes.
Thatcher’s sell-off of council houses, with no plan to replace them, set today’s housing crisis in motion. Decades of half-baked schemes for social housing and fudged schemes for “affordable” homes have left us in a mess.
Young people are locked out, and soon we’ll face another crunch: by 2035, a quarter of us will be over 65, with nowhere near enough homes for later-life living. Fixing this needs a fundamental rethink — build homes to live in not to enrich landowners and developers.
SOME OF OUR EARLIER ARTICLES –
Not only a UK crisis
Housing: a better way?