A place to call your own

The single biggest financial hurdle for many of us in this country is the cost of getting a roof over our heads. Quickly followed by keeping it there.

Every year, developers throw up flats and homes in their thousands for those who are well off when what we really need is more good quality housing that ordinary people can afford – particularly those with young families. Affordability needs to be addressed directly; simply increasing the supply just ruins the environment without helping those families.

The Green Party will use tough planning rules to make sure developers include truly affordable housing – for rent not just one-off sales – in all new developments. Already, in Oxford, persistent work by Green councillors has led to an increase in the proportion of affordable housing in new developments from 20 to 50%.

Considering that most government proposals also involve building on green or brownfield sites, sometimes even on flood plains, it’s astonishing that more isn’t being done to use the country’s stock of 700,000 empty homes and the many more that are either underused, in poor condition or in places of low economic activity.

So before the Green Party built any new homes, we would first arrange funding to re-build and repair these houses, buy existing houses for social use and make sure empty ones were made available for use as homes.