Shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy today vowed to end the political ‘vandalism’ of UK social housing stock.
Speaking at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool, Ms Nandy said she wanted to restore council housing to the second biggest form of tenure and promised new powers for all forms of devolved leadership.
Ms Nandy told delegates: ‘We’ll mend the deliberate vandalism of our social housing stock.
'Council housing is not a dirty word so today I can announce we’ll be the first Government in a generation to restore social housing to the second-largest form of tenure.’
Paraphrasing Tony Blair’s famous 1997 speech on education, Nandy added: ‘This will be our mantra: council housing, council housing, council housing.’
Labour has also vowed to oversee a 10-year plan to reform social care, build a national care service, ‘empower all of our leaders across local government’ and oversee the ‘biggest wave of insourcing for a generation’.
In a speech at the party’s annual conference, deputy leader Angela Rayner said Labour would raise standards by ‘clawing back the public’s money from those who fail to deliver for taxpayers’ and ‘striking off failed providers’ to ensure failure was not rewarded.
Under Labour, before any service is contracted out, public bodies would have to show the work ‘could not be done better in-house’ and the party would ‘end the scandal of outsourced workers getting second class pay and conditions’.
Elsewhere at conference, Labour’s shadow transport secretary restated the party’s commitment to delivering Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) in full.
Louise Haigh accused the Conservatives of ‘flunking’ repeated promises to build NPR, adding: ‘We will deliver an Elizabeth Line for the North and build NPR and HS2 in full.’
During her campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Prime Minister Liz Truss backed NPR, adding it would ‘bring better jobs’ to the region and address the productivity gap.
However, this came after the Conservative Government had previously rowed back on promises to build NPR in favour of smaller new lines and an extension of the pre-existing Transpennine route upgrade.
This article was originally published by The MJ (£).
