Labour pledges "housing revolution" amid big fall in social rented homes built in Rotherham and Barnsley

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Labour's manifesto launch yesterday included new plans for the biggest council and social housing programme in decades.

We're going to kick start a housing revolution, with the biggest investment in new council and social homes this country has seen for decades.

At the current rate of building social rented homes in Rotherham, it would take 303 years to house all 6,674 people on the council housing waiting list.

The number being built fell from 147 in 2010/11, when the last Labour government’s funding for councils was still being delivered, to 22 in 2017/18, the last financial year for which there are figures.

There are 3,888 people waiting for a council home in Barnsley but not a single home was built for them last year. In 2010/11, 385 social rented homes were built.

As well as the Labour candidate for Wentworth & Dearne, I'm also Labour's Shadow Housing Secretary.

So I'm leading Labour's plan to fix the housing crisis, which includes:

  • scaling up council house building so that we are building 100,000 council homes a year by the end of the parliament, a more than 3,500% increase
  • building at least 50,000 additional genuinely affordable homes a year through housing associations by the end of the parliament
  • at least 150,000 new council and social homes a year within five years, delivering the biggest council housebuilding programme since the years immediately after the Second World War, and the biggest overall affordable housebuilding programme since the 1960s.

Our transformational housing plans will mean thousands more genuinely affordable homes for people on ordinary incomes in every area of the country.

Our modern council and social housing will be built to cutting-edge design and green standards providing a long-term investment in our country’s future.

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