Following the Grenfell House fire in the Summer of 2017 housing charity SHELTER put together a commission set out a better future for social housing.
North Staffs Green Party have endorsed the report published by the commission, Campaign Coordinator Adam Colclough said, ‘providing decent housing for all is one of the defining issues of our time and needs urgent action’.
The housing crisis in the UK is getting worse with the lowest amount of social housing being built for 70 years. As a result, 1.2million households are on local authority waiting lists and are often trapped in expensive private rented accommodation.
The SHELTER report warns that ‘unless we act now, we face a future in which a generation will be trapped renting privately’, adding that as a result ‘more people will grow old in private rentals and billions more in welfare costs will be paid to private landlords’.
At the 2017 general election the Green Party stood on a manifesto commitment to build 100,000 environmentally friendly homes for social rent by 2020. The party also pledged to end the sale of council housing, abolish the bedroom tax and to give tenants stronger rights.
This aligns with many of the points made in the SHELTER report, which calls for a twenty-year programme to build 3.1million homes for social rent by 2020 and for the government to use its upcoming comprehensive spending review to increase funding for social housing.
Campaign Coordinator Adam Colclough said, ‘as a party we have supported the building of more social housing since the eighties’, adding ‘we fully support SHELTER in their call on the government om use the comprehensive spending review to fund the quality housing so many families are struggling to find’.
To find out more about the SHELTER campaign and to sign their petition click on this link: https://england.shelter.org.uk/support_us/campaigns
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