Labour councillor, Geoff Lumley, shares this news. Ed
After securing IW Council support for a motion opposing the Government’s Housing & Planning Bill last January (at 20.33 in live coverage), Labour Councillor Geoff Lumley has now succeeded in getting opposition to the Act the subject of the IW Labour Party’s motion to the Party’s Annual Conference later this month. The Act is due to be implemented next April.
In a Motion agreed by an overwhelming majority of local Labour members at their monthly meeting last week, it reads in part:
“Conference recognises that the Tories’ Housing and Planning Act will, if implemented, disastrously increase the problems facing those in need of decent and affordable housing. In particular through:
- undermining requirements on private developers to provide affordable homes. (The ‘starter homes’ proposals will be unaffordable to families and young people on ordinary incomes in most parts of the country; will not preserve the taxpayer investment; and will be built at the expense of genuinely-affordable homes to rent and buy)
- not helping with the high rents, poor conditions and insecurity affecting many of England’s 11m private renters – including one in four families with children – and doing nothing to help arrest the rise in homelessness.
Labour is committed to campaign for a massive increase in the supply of housing, including council housing with proper security of tenure and genuinely affordable rents. Labour will therefore vigorously campaign against the Act which threatens that commitment.”
Cllr Lumley said,
“Housing is one of the biggest problems facing young families on the Island and I felt it was something the local party should be pushing at Party Conference. Most young families will never be able to afford a mortgage, even so-called starter homes. We need more social housing for rent and a far better regulated private-rented sector. Without them we will just see the continuing profiteering by many private-sector landlords at the expense of the housing benefit system.”
IW Labour’s Conference delegate will now have the job of getting the Motion debated at Conference later this month, with Cllr Lumley confident that Housing will be the subject of a major debate.
Image: lydiashiningbrightly under CC BY 2.0
