ED MILIBAND made a passionate case for ousting the coalition government yesterday, but his “six pledges” fall short of the ambitious agenda for change he needs to present if Labour is to do that next May.

He correctly identified the NHS, low pay and the housing shortage as key battleground issues for the election — but his party’s plans on all three are timid.

The Con-Dem Health and Social Care Act has had a devastating impact on the health service in England, opening it up to creeping privatisation.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham has repeatedly pledged to repeal it, and rightly so.

Mr Burnham was also right to demand a moratorium on selling health service contracts which could pose legal problems for Labour if it tries to bring them back into the public sector after an election victory.

But NHS England’s response was to point to EU procurement rules which prevent it from halting the process.

Labour, still operating under the delusion that the anti-democratic, austerity-obsessed European Union is somehow progressive, has failed to indicate that it will bring NHS contracts back in-house regardless of what Brussels bureaucrats say.

Mr Miliband did not even touch on that yesterday.

His pledge of a £2.5 billion funding increase, paid for through a windfall tax on tobacco companies and a mansion tax, is welcome and necessary, but we still need a clear indication that Labour has the political will to halt NHS privatisation — especially since the party has many MPs in receipt of money from private healthcare firms.

Two of his pledges related to the key theme of this year’s TUC — Britain needs a pay rise.

Ensuring workers’ wages rise in line with economic growth is an admirable aim and one which would reverse more than three decades in which wages have shrunk as a share of Britain’s output as employers extract more and more profit from our work.

But he was short on proposals to make this happen.

Alongside his pledge to recruit thousands more NHS workers he could have indicated that Labour will raise public-sector pay to make up for years in which it has fallen behind inflation.

A public-sector pay rise would make a real difference to millions of workers.

The Tory media would howl with rage, but Mr Miliband should realise that it will do its best to demonise him and his party whatever he says — the man who showed courage in taking on Rupert Murdoch and whose father was slandered by the Daily Mail must prove that he does not intend to pander to newspaper tycoons during the election campaign.

His house-building programme to address the chronic housing shortage aims to “double the number of first-time buyers,” but 200,000 new homes a year is far less than we need and he made no mention of the importance of rebuilding lost council-housing stock.

Thatcher’s right-to-buy madness has failed. House prices and rents are ridiculously high and personal debt levels unsustainable. Labour should break from the private ownership model and commit to providing social housing and secure, affordable rents.

And Labour is still not talking public ownership where it matters — on transport, on water, on energy, on banks.

Big majorities are in favour of renationalising the railways and the energy cartels. These are simple ways to start fixing our broken economy and win votes into the bargain.

The Scottish referendum showed how disillusioned millions of voters are with the Labour Party. The idea that the working class have nowhere else to go has been comprehensively trashed.

If Labour is to win next year, it needs to stop pulling its punches and offer us far more than Mr Miliband did yesterday.