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Labour seeks solutions to housing crisis
Labour’s next manifesto should contain the bold aim that no one is left homeless and to do that, councils need to be enabled to build at least 500,000 new homes. LIZ DAVIES explains

Everyone, even the Tories, agrees that Britain has a housing crisis. The government’s Housing White Paper, published in January, was called “Fixing our broken housing market.”

The problem is that the Tories offer a few tweaks to the planning system and then revert to market solutions. The idea is that private developers will then build more houses and the increased supply should bring down prices and private rents — problem solved.

The most visible sign of the crisis is homelessness. On any average night in England, approximately 4,000 people are sleeping rough — twice the number of 2010. The numbers of people applying to local councils for help because they are homeless has also doubled over the same period.

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