Hat tip Julianne at
West Ham Labour blog. "Last night West Ham’s Executive Committee agreed to submit a
contemporary motion to Labour’s party conference. The motion presses
Labour to take further action to provide genuinely affordable housing
(text below).
EC considered two motions – one on Gaza and one on housing. There was
overwhelming discussion and support for both motions, but on a vote the
CLP decided to submit the motion on housing.
There’s quite a few stages to go before our motion gets debated at
conference. Firstly it has to be accepted by the conference committee,
if it is (and many are not) it will be grouped with similar motions.
The motion would then go to a ballot of conference delegates. If our
motion was chosen for debate (up to eight motions can be chosen) our
delegate, Julianne Marriott, would need to work with the delegates who
submitted similar motions to agree the wording of a joint motion and who
should speak in the debate. After a debate Labour’s policy commission
will consider the motion and debate.
We’ll update on how our motion fares on its journey to conference.
Text of the contemporary motion:
“Homes people can afford
Conference notes:
1. TUC’s research, published on 2 September, which finds that
Copeland in Cumbria is the only local authority in England where the
average house price is less than three times average annual pay.
2. Shelter’s investigation, published 7 August, which found that 1 in
3 homeless families in London have been trapped in temporary
accommodation for over two years because the major shortage of socially
affordable homes means councils are struggling to find suitable housing
for homeless families.
3. That twice as many working people (963,000) are relying on housing
benefit than they were five years ago and that this Tory Government
only invests £5 in the Affordable Homes Programme for every £95 it
spends on housing benefit.
4. The compulsory landlord licensing scheme introduced by the London
Borough of Newham which has prosecuted 500 landlords over health and
safety breaches in the last 18 months.
5. These examples demonstrate not only the growing crisis of
affordability in housing caused by this Government’s handling of the
economy but also this Government’s refusal to address it.
Conference calls on the Labour party to continue to expose Tory
failure and to take bold action to increase and rebalance funding for
genuinely affordable homes, remove the right to buy subsidy and replace
homes bought under right to buy on a like-for-like basis, create minimum
statutory standards for landlords and prevent further inflation of the
cost of housing.”
