LABOUR IS IN POWER. SO WHERE ARE THE HOMES?
Labour has become a far posher party than it used to be, with more landlords than tenants in its ranks.
I have been a Labour member for most of my adult life. I am delighted to see the party back in government, both nationally and in so many of our great cities. Well, I think I should be, but sometimes you have to wonder. It should feel like the start of a renewal, a moment when the public realm rises again after years of neglect. Yet on housing, the single most important domestic issue facing ordinary people, Labour’s performance is not just disappointing. It is a disgrace. There is plenty of inspired talk and very little meaningful action. We are presiding over a national emergency and offering managerial excuses instead of municipal ambition.
Look first at London. Five boroughs have built no affordable homes at all this year. None. City of London, Hackney, Lambeth, Merton and Richmond. Another eleven scraped into single figures. Across the whole capital only 1,239 affordable homes were started in the first half of the year, putting the city on course for one of the lowest totals in a decade. The Labour Mayor, backed by a Labour government, has even slashed developers’ affordable housing requirements from 35 per cent to 20 per cent, a policy presented as bold intervention but which looks a lot like surrender. When Labour’s flagship city cannot force even its own boroughs to build, the rhetoric begins to sound painfully hollow.
It is not much better in the West Midlands. The region has more than 64,000 households on social housing waiting lists. Only about 2,000 affordable homes were started last year. The private rented market is closed to half the population, with only around twelve per cent of available properties affordable on Local Housing Allowance. This is Labour heartland territory, yet from a national 9.8 billion pound housing fund the region received just 275 million, a miserable 2.8 per cent. We tell voters that Labour will rebalance the country, but the region that powered the industrial revolution now receives crumbs.
And then we come to Birmingham. If you want a case study in how not to handle housing in a Labour city, you do not need to look far. Birmingham has more than 26,000 households on its housing register. More than 11,000 children are in temporary accommodation. The council manages only around 2,800 lets a year across the whole system. A family in desperate need stands almost no chance of obtaining a secure home within a reasonable time.
Yet it did not have to be this way. Birmingham once had the courage and capability to build. In 2009 the council created the Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust, a proper housebuilding arm designed to revive large scale municipal delivery. It was launched not by Labour but by Conservative councillor John Lines. Many Labour activists disliked him but the simple truth is that he did what Labour said it believed in. He built homes. He pledged 500 new council homes a year. For a while the city delivered at scale. By the mid 2010s the trust was producing more than 500 homes a year, the biggest council housebuilding drive in Birmingham for more than three decades.
Under Labour control the trust was allowed to wither. Completions fell year by year until there were barely seventy five in 2023 and 2024. A council report quietly admitted six years of deterioration and missed opportunities. Instead of reviving the builder, Labour has chosen to wind down the BMHT companies altogether and switch to a model of selling land to housing associations and institutional landlords. A proud municipal builder has been reduced to a land disposal service. The result is predictable. Birmingham is fast becoming HMO central while council housing remains static.
If you want a symbol of municipal mismanagement, nothing beats Perry Barr. The council spent nearly half a billion pounds building an athletes’ village for the Commonwealth Games. It was not finished in time and stood unused during the event. Afterwards the estate sat under occupied for years, rows of pristine buildings with barely a handful of residents while the wider development drifted. Eventually the council sold much of the scheme to a private buyer at a projected loss of more than three hundred million pounds. The city now faces decades of interest payments on the debt. All this while more than twenty six thousand Birmingham families wait for a proper home. What a triumph of Labour municipal governance. I could hardly feel prouder.
There is another awkward truth here. When Labour now asks people to apply to be council candidates, one of the questions is whether they own property in Birmingham. That was never asked in my time. The party clearly knows that many of its councillors are landlords. When large numbers of elected representatives rely on private rents for income, it becomes harder to imagine a bold municipal housebuilding crusade. Too many people are quietly invested in keeping the status quo exactly as it is.
And let me add something else from my own time in local government. When I was first elected, it was not unusual at all for councillors to live in council accommodation themselves. Plenty did. They understood the system because they lived in it. They knew the rent, the repairs, the anxieties, the waiting lists, the cold mornings and the damp evenings. Today that is almost unheard of. Labour has become a far posher party than it used to be, with more landlords than tenants in its ranks. When the party of council housing stops having councillors who actually live in council housing, the priorities shift, and not for the better.
Perhaps I am sensitive to all this because I remember a better time. My first home, in Hall Green in the mid 1980s, cost 17,500 pounds. About three times my annual salary. Well, that is not quite right, because in those days most of us did not have annual salaries at all. We had weekly wages, handed over in brown envelopes, and somehow we still managed to buy homes. Today the average house on that same road is around 240,000. For that to be affordable on the same terms you would need to earn something close to 80,000 pounds. Most people do not. The housing ladder that once existed has been pulled up. Thatcher’s Right to Buy was political genius but social vandalism, turning public housing into electoral capital. Labour protested but never reversed it. The result was a shrinking stock and a shortage that has swollen into a crisis. We tell people we will fix the system, but what has happened in Birmingham and beyond suggests we are not even trying.
The irony is that Birmingham once led Britain in municipal building. Labour’s Sir Frank Price was a housing titan, driving slum clearance and delivering new estates at a scale the country had not seen. Labour’s Lord Denis Howell was a national and local champion of social housing, a man who believed in its moral purpose and fought for its expansion. They saw council housing as an act of civic pride, a foundation for decent lives, not a grudging obligation. Today the city of Price and Howell has lost that spirit. Where they built boldly, we manage decline. Where they expanded the stock, we sell, lease back or hand responsibility to others.
Labour is in power. Nationally. Regionally. Locally. This should be the moment we rebuild the homes this country needs. Yet instead of a housing renaissance we have shrinking ambitions, scaled back builders, broken promises and developments that sit under occupied while our people wait. Social housing is the backbone of a fair society. It should be the first priority of any Labour government worthy of the name. But in London, in the West Midlands and in Birmingham, the delivery is simply not there.
We cannot blame the past forever. Thatcher did enough damage, but it was up to Labour to put it right. Instead we have drifted. We need the courage of our predecessors. We need the spirit of Price, Howell and, yes, even Tory John Lines, who in practice did more to build council homes than Labour has managed in the past decade or more.
If Labour truly wants to lead a fairer Britain, it must build one. Britain needs social homes, not slogans. Families need roofs, not rhetoric. The country is watching. The crisis is worsening. And time is running out.