Milton Keynes Green Party

As speculation and political chaos continue to dominate the focus on Westminster, the Social Housing Bill, which made it into the King's Speech, won't get much attention...here's why it should: - This will protect victims of domestic abuse in social housing and bring about major reforms (long-promised by Labour) to the Right to Buy by protecting newly built social homes from being sold off for 35 years - As @rosegrayston, housing policy expert and former Labour government advisor, told me, “for the first time since Right to Buy was introduced in 1980, new council homes will be protected from sale. This will give councils the confidence to start building at scale again.” - However, we still don't know a) how many of the 1.5 million homes Labour would like (but probably won't) build will be social homes - And, arguably, they could be bolder right now. For instance, leading economists such as Dame Kate Barker have previously told me that it was a mistake not to build social homes in the early 2010s when interest rates were lower. So, given that the housing crisis we currently have as a nation is partly why our politics is so febrile (see research on housing and populism)...now is the time to act, if ever there was one... - @Shelter have said the government should have gone further: “There’s only one solution to the housing emergency: a new generation of social homes. To get councils building, the govt must free them from mountains of unfair housing debt that is holding them back. This is the step change necessary to ramp up to the 90,000 social rent homes we need a year for 10 years," says Chief Exec Sarah Elliott