Homes and Communities

ALL TOGETHER : Policies for housing and communities

Solving the housing crisis

Britain's housing market is broken. There are those who own many homes and profit from renting out homes for profit. As government invests in infrastructure it is the property owners and not the tenants who benefit. Or to put it another the absent landlords and not the people who live there who profit.

Our welfare budget rises year on year as the poor claim government money to pay their rents. Landlord are enriching themselves through a tax subsidy. They are buying up more and more property which is pushing up prices and putting it further out of the reach of ordinary people. Today it is predicted that people need to earn £60,000 a year to get a basic mortgage in London. The average salary is about £22,000 a year.

The many are condemned to a precarious existance as tenants of homes they can't afford
While a few are growing rich from this housing dystopia

It is dividing society between the have's and the have nots.
This cannot continue. 

We believe that the solution lays in giving tenants ownership rights and this can be achieved by dividing the deeds for buildings and land. Giving tenants the automatically ability to mutually own the land.


A solution is needed to this crisis, my promises are :

1) New homes of more than 10 units will be built on land that must be owned by a community land trust in which tenants and the community have a controlling stake

2) Unused land will be subjected to a land value tax to stop speculators

3) We will build new Garden Cities using social principles to create socially, economic and ecologically sustainable communities

4) Estates and communities to be provided the ability to mutualise their land so that in the long term it is owned and controlled for the benefit of all. This will use the principles proposed by Shann Turnbull of Co-operative Land Banks.

5) Tenants will automatically acquire a share in the land that their home is on over time. It will be both tenants and landlords who will benefit from rises in land value.

6) Land on all Housing Associations to be mutualised and put into trusts that are community and tenant controlled to stop future asset stripping by Housing Associations.




This six point plan will create homes that are owned and controlled by tenants will still giving a fair deal to honest landlords.