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Building for the future - why Labour mustn't forget the construction industry

By Stephen Gummer This week it's official; Britain is out of recession. There are many in the Labour Party, myself included, that think this is largely attributable to the economic recovery package put in place by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. Meeting recession with brutal cuts would have done very little to help anyone and while it may have been the easier path to take we can be very proud of a leadership that opted for the more complex...
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Dear Alex: Responding to the New Ideas series

By Ed Miliband MP / @EdMilibandMP 22 January 2010 Dear Alex, Thank you for your letter about your New Ideas for a Renewed Movement series. I am really sorry for the delay in replying. The New Ideas series was fantastic. I really enjoyed reading the proposals put forward and the debate it generated. I’ve had a look at all of them on the site but I’ll respond to the five in your letter. Increase the National Minimum Wage – as...
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Next week's PBR should extend the stamp duty holiday to help first time buyers

By Jessica Asato / @Jessica_Asato Next week’s Pre-Budget Report should seize the opportunity and provide a boost to first time buyers by extending the stamp duty holiday currently in place but due to expire in the New Year. An EDM tabled by Labour MPs Jon Cruddas, Lindsay Hoyle and others yesterday highlights the issue. It argues that we need to continue helping families and individuals to buy property in the current economic climate, and urges the Government to extend the...
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The difference Labour has made for homeowners is clear

By Chris Williamson In December 1993 a local magazine, Derbyshire Now, published a piece I had written about the aftermath of the late 1980s and early 1990s property boom that saw record numbers of repossessions (left). When I wrote that article 16% of mortgage holders were in negative equity. Now, 16 years later the situation is very different. The worst worldwide economic downturn since the 1930s, fuelled by the collapse of the so-called US subprime property market, could have had...
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Shedding light on Cameron’s favourite Council leader's bizarre comments about homelessness and poverty

By Stephen Cowan David Cameron clearly believes he can have it both ways. This week he argued he wants to tackle poverty. However, back in June, he was in Hammersmith and Fulham to tell Tory councillors how “proud” he is of their agenda - which involves cutting services and introducing new stealth taxes for some of that borough’s poorest citizens. So John Denham was right to call Cameron out on this obvious discrepancy. Yesterday, the story moved on when H&F’s...
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Healey: We need a national crusade for greener homes

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 Housing Minister John Healey has today urged every homeowner, developer, tenant and landlord to join a "national crusade" to reduce excessive carbon emissions leaking from their homes and businesses - just a few weeks ahead of the climate change summit in Copenhagen. Mr Healey has just finished a speech to the IPPR, in which he said everyone needs to play their part, and that planning systems need to make it easier for homeowners and developers...
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The homes we need

By James Murray Opposition is frustrating. In Islington, we watch the Lib Dem council administration failing to act on the affordable housing crisis with the urgency and conviction we know we would bring to the problem. There are 13,000 households on the waiting list in Islington. But even numbers like this – not uncommon across the country – do not convey the repeated human cost of the situation for individual families. Having three or four children sharing a bedroom, or...
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When it comes to tackling the BNP we have to start from where people are at, not where we want them to be

By Margaret Hodge MP This article is based on the text of a speech delivered to the Progress rally at the Labour Party Conference in September. It has been published in response to the ongoing controversy surrounding Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time this evening, and is being published simultaneously on the Progress website. The task of taking on and defeating the BNP is one of the most challenging that we face. In my constituency in Barking, we’ve spent the...
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What support for 16 and 17 year old parents really means

By Grace Fletcher-Hackwood The Prime Minister’s speech yesterday featured a barrage of new policy announcements. 10,000 new green job placements; free childcare for a quarter of a million two-year-olds; scrapping compulsory ID cards; legislation on international aid in the budget; speedy diagnosis for cancer patients; free personal care for elderly people with the highest need; measures to allow constituencies to recall their MP where there is proven financial corruption; and a referendum on the Alternative Vote. However, there is another policy...
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Gordon's getting a bit anti-social

By Rowenna Davis Nice speech Gordon. But why do you want to ruin such a progressive set of policies with an outdated return to the antisocial behaviour agenda? The PM's speech this afternoon was littered with inflamatory rhetoric on "teenage tearaways" and populist "action squads" designed to "crack down on estates". Parents of kids engaged in anti-social behaviour will be forced to attend mandatory parenting classes or risk losing their benefits (which parents of badly behaved middle class kids can...
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Why the left should resist the temptation of the Mansion Tax

By Tim Nicholls / @tim_nicholls I’m a leftie. I believe, to my very core, in the redistribution of wealth because more equal societies are better functioning, happier and more just. I believe that the rich have a moral duty to help pay for those in need. So, I must be positively cock-a-hoop about the Lib Dem’s new plan (if infighting does not cause them to retract it) to implement a new mansion tax. I should be calling on Labour to...
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Proposal #18: Create a national housing standards agency to regulate private landlords

By Grace Fletcher-Hackwood Labour has achieved many things for the millions of private tenants in the UK. The 2004 Housing Act made it easier for local authorities to prioritise action on health and safety hazards in privately rented homes, as well as introducing the more well-known tenancy deposit protection which came into force in April 2007. But this has by no means guaranteed that every tenant rents a property which is fit to live in. According to the English House...
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How was Osborne able to hoodwink Channel 4 News and claim Labour's success in Hammersmith and Fulham?

By Toby Flux / @labourmatters Channel 4 News aired a piece after George Osborne’s recent speech in which he claimed that to understand how a Conservative government would behave you need only to look at Councils like Hammersmith and Fulham. It’s therefore very odd that the Tories advanced the new Westfield shopping centre and the new Shepherds Bush library (delivered at no cost to the taxpayer) as the two things that best demonstrated why Osborne is right to pick Hammersmith...
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Proposal #16: A full, wide ranging housing plan

By Rosie Hucklesby / @rosiehucklesby In the current recession, the housing market has taken a severe blow. It's predicted that up to 65,000 homes have faced repossession and somewhere between 2 million and 5 million people are awaiting social housing in England. 220,000 borrowers were more than three months behind with mortgage payments by the end of December last year, up 72 per cent, and many homeowners are finding that they can no longer afford to meet mortgage payments through...
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A Co-operative solution to meeting affordable housing needs

By David Rodgers The global financial crisis has had a devastating impact on the housing market, the availability of mortgages and the supply of affordable housing. How we meet the demand for affordable homes and prevent a further socially and economically damaging spiral of house price inflation in future years, fuelled by an acute shortage of housing supply, is a key issue of social justice. If we are to meet this challenge we need to be innovative and creative in...
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Our values or theirs? How the Tory mask is slipping on housing policy

By Shabana Mahmood Two stories in recent days about Tory policies on housing prove that behind the mask of so-called “Compassionate Conservatism” the Tory party is as nasty as ever. Caroline Spelman has written to all Tory MPs and Councils advising them to delay housing developments until they win power. The Shadow Communities Secretary sets out Tory policy to “revoke... ... in whole or in part...” Labour’s regional development targets and that they would not “... pay a penny of...
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If the green belt is sacrosanct where do we put our houses?

By Julian Ware-Lane /  @warelane Green belt designation for England was instigated in 1955 as a means of restricting urban growth. Green belts perform three principle functions: 1. They provide recreational open spaces 2. They contribute the concept of a sustainable environment 3. They provide a buffer between urban areas With an ever growing population (and this week saw the release of the latest population estimate for the UK showing a substantial increase) the green belt, particularly near already densely...
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We cannot afford to cut the surplus housing benefit

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 According to a report in today's Times, budget smallprint will abolish the £780 per year surplus housing benefit allowance. That's £15 per week that could be withdrawn from the pockets of the worse off in the middle of a recession. With the economy not yet recovered, these plans will hit the poorest the hardest and ignore calls from Labour supporters for more supportive housing benefit reform. Indeed, dropping the surplus benefit allowance may leave the...
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Why Labour should launch the H-factor - housing for the next generation

By AnnaJoy David An alternative version of this article appeared in Tribune. Britain has not engaged in a serious attempt to tackle its housing problems for two decades. With the slowdown in the private sector, developers are likely to fail to meet their obligations to include social housing in their plans as their budgets get squeezed. If left unchecked, a bad situation will get worse as demand for social housing increases and supply become even more restricted. There are three...
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Don't bet the house on it: no turning back to housing boom and bust

By Joe Cox An analysis of the dynamic of the market and society is at the heart at everything Compass does. Where are markets failing? Where are they are working? Where should they be restrained and where is competition needed? All these questions need to be debated as we move into a post-neoliberal world. In our new report “don’t bet the house on it: no turning back to housing boom and bust” we explore one area of market failure -...
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