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.

The Right-to-Buy scheme has seen over 408,480 social homes in England alone sold off since 1998 (and 1.7 million since the scheme was introduced in 1980), yet only 180,444 social homes have been built in the same period. The sheer lunacy of this has left council waiting lists growing (trebled in Chesterfield and Sheffield), and children living in cramped conditions.We now face the worst crisis in Social Housing since ‘Cathy Come Home’ just as the home ownership market teeters on the edge of an early 1990s-style repossession disaster.

The much-hyped Housing Bill sadly offers only more of the same spin and poverty of ambition that has come to exemplify this Government, with a commitment to build 45,000 social homes a year by 2011, some 11,000 short of the Barker Report’s recommendations and still desperately short of what is needed.

Liberal Democrat policy now and before the 2005 election is of course to support the ‘Fourth Option’ for Council Housing: to allow Housing Authorities to retain all rents and capital receipts as RSLs (Registered Social Landlords) can; and to have equal treatment in bidding for Government housing funds without the discrimination that favours first RSLs, then ALMOs, and largely excludes directly managed authorities. We must step up the pressure on the Government to end its dogmatic and discriminatory treatment.

You can e-mail or post a written submission to be included in the report that will be produced from next Tuesday’s sessions – highlighting the impact of current Government policy on your area (negative and positive subsidy, growing waiting lists, etc). Better still, a delegation of anything from one upwards can attend and give evidence in person.

The evidence session will run from 12 noon to 2.00 pm in Committee Room 10 in the Commons and from 3.00-6.00 pm in CR 15.

If you require any further information please feel free to contact my office on [email protected]

* Paul Holmes is Liberal Democrat MP for Chesterfield, and Vice-Chair of the House of Commons Council Housing Group.