Plans to build one million new homes over the next decade have been launched by the Labour Party.
In their recently published Green Paper, announced in September last year, Labour aims to create a “starting point in a conversation about how to fix our broken housing system, so that it works for the many, not the few.”
Among the proposals, Labour set out its intention to redefine ‘affordable housing’, stating that they will link this to local income rather than market prices, as well as support councils and housing associations with new funding to help them build at scale.
Aiming to end the so-called viability loophole which can enable developers to avoid their contribution to more affordable homes, the party propose to introduce a new duty to deliver affordable housing, as well as an English Sovereign Land Trust to boost availability of land more cheaply.
Labour Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn said: “We have promised today that the next Labour Government will deliver one million genuinely affordable homes over ten years, the majority of which will be for social rent.
“And that we will dismiss the Tories farcical definition of affordable housing for the sham that it is, replacing it with a definition that understands that whether housing is affordable or not depends on how much people earn, not how much speculators have flooded property markets.
“This Green Paper sets out many of the radical measures needed, transforming the planning system and ending the “viability” loophole so that commercial developers aren’t let off the hook; giving councils new powers to acquire land to build on and better use land the public already owns; and the financial backing to actually deliver, which means the ability to borrow to build restored to all councils; and extra support from central government too.”
