Angela Rayner has given her strongest hint yet that Labour will announce a major package of social housebuilding in next month’s spending review, saying the party will have abandoned its “moral mission” if it fails to do so.
The deputy prime minister told an event at Labour conference on Sunday she expected the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to make a promise on social housing next month, with the government under pressure to build hundreds of thousands more social homes.
Labour has promised to build 1.5m new homes over the course of the parliament, but experts say this will not be possible without finding money to build at least 90,000 socially rented houses and flats in England every year.
Asked about that target at a panel event organised by the homelessness charity Shelter, Rayner said: “Unless we address the social and council housing problem in this country, then we’re really not going to get to the root problem of the housing crisis for everybody.
“I actually think it’s a moral mission with the Labour government to recognise the problem and to build the social housing we need. I’ve been honest about not putting a figure on that today, because there’s a lot of moving parts within that. But hopefully at the spending review, you’ll see that this government is really serious that we’re going to build those houses we desperately need.
“It’s a moral mission for our government, and if it wasn’t, then what’s Labour for if we’re not building safe and secure homes that people need?”
Labour has promised to spur housebuilding with a mixture of mandatory targets for local authorities and major reforms to the planning system. Experts say, however, that this will not be enough to meet the party’s promise to build 300,000 more homes a year, not least because new planning approvals are at a 10-year low.
Shelter and others have said that to meet that pledge ministers will need to fund 90,000 new social homes a year. In a report earlier this year, the charity found that doing so would cost central government £11.8bn, with an additional £23.6bn to come from social housing providers or local authorities.
The charity argued the policy would pay back that investment within 11 years, and give an additional £12bn boost to the Treasury over 30 years.
Reeves is already under pressure to increase spending on several fronts, including by reversing the winter fuel payment cuts she announced in July. Unions are planning to bring a vote during conference condemning those cuts and calling on her to reverse them.
As part of her plans to boost social home provision in England, Rayner is also considering making it harder for tenants of council houses to buy their own home. Rayner bought her own council house using the right-to-buy scheme, but now argues that the discounts on such homes have become so steep that the housing stock is being depleted quickly.
“I’ve said that I’ll do a consultation on this, but the government, the changes that they made in 2012 means that more of our council homes are being sold off, and we just can’t replace them,” she said.
