Council House Building

EDM number 2264 in 2007-08, proposed by Austin Mitchell on 16/10/2008.
Categorised under the topic of Housing.

That this House, recognising that housing starts are falling as private builders fail and housing associations struggle with financial difficulties, points out that the only way to achieve the big house building drive which is essential to stimulate the economy and provide for growing housing need is by bringing councils back into house building on a big scale and enabling them to build the type of housing which is now necessary: public housing for rent on secure tenancies; and therefore emphasises that doing that requires the Government to stop siphoning large sums out of housing revenue accounts, and to end the financial meanness, inducements and bullying used to force councils to privatise their housing stock, to call a moratorium on large-scale voluntary transfers, which are now a drain on both financial markets and government funding, diverting money needed for building to ownership games and to give councils a level playing field with housing associations and the adequate grants they need, not only to build but to repair their 2.8 million council houses, to regenerate the estates as mixed communities, not social dumping grounds, and to achieve the Decent Homes Target by 2010, because only if the Government now abandons its obsession with home ownership and its ideological hostility to councils can a new era of co-operation be initiated without which Government, both local and national, will fail to meet the housing needs of the people.

This motion has been signed by a total of 30 MPs.