Next Tuesday delegates from throughout the country will meet in the House of Commons to take part in an evidence session organised by the group, Defend Council Housing. This coincides with the Committee Stage of the Housing Bill and is designed to help lobby the Government over its continued discrimination against those authorities who have retained the management of Council Housing as a result of tenants’ wishes.

These 140 local authorities, plus the 60 ALMOs (Alms-Length Management Organisations), will continue to be discriminated against if the Housing Bill passes in its current form. Now that the Government has suddenly awoken to the housing crisis they have presided over it would be perverse if they were to continue to discriminate against half the authority areas in England on the basis that their tenants had ‘voted the wrong way’ in stock transfer ballots.

In Parliament in the past both Blair and Brown have told me that “I should celebrate ‘choice’ over this issue.” I do - but nearly half of all Council tenants have democratically chosen NOT to opt for privatisation. No one has yet been able to explain to me why, as a result of exercising their democratic choice, 10,000 Council tenants in an area like Chesterfield should therefore have £4 million of their rents and further millions of Right-to-Buy receipts stolen away by Gordon Brown this year. Especially when a ’stock transfer’ landlord would immediately be allowed by Gordon to retain all that money for re-investment into Chesterfield social housing.

It is essential that we do not fall victim to the spin that heralded Gordon Brown’s new-found commitment to social housing. It cannot hide the 10 years of abject neglect of social housing under this Labour Government. The Labour manifesto of 1997 lambasted the Conservatives’ woeful record on social housing, but things have got worse not better, and the continuing neglect has left over 1.6 million families on waiting lists - a 63% increase since Labour came to power.

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