I will try to cut and paste, I couldn't access it through my link:
Labour politicians claim that they can be trusted more with housing than the Conservatives. The party says that councils it controls have built on average 2,600 new homes between 2010 and now, compared with 1,700 in Tory-led areas. Mr Healey says that a Labour government would ramp up housebuilding (though he has not said that he would meet the target of 300,000 a year set by a recent House of Lords report).
Yet who can be trusted more on housing: Labour or the Tories? Since 1969, when records from the Department of Communities and Local Government began, each party has built around 220,000 houses in each year that they were in office. Labour is ahead, but only just. Labour might therefore have a claim to be the party of housing.
However, it is not clear whether Labour’s recent performance leaves it worthy of that accolade. The party has not provided us with the actual research behind Mr Healey’s claim. The research was produced by the House of Commons library, but they cannot give us the exact calculations either, only the general approach that they took. All we have is the press release with the final figures. The press release gives a link to some DCLG data, which apparently were used in the analysis, but none of these data relates to local authorities.
So to see how the parties measure up, we looked at how many houses have been built in the metropolitan councils, district councils, unitary authorities and London boroughs controlled by Labour (the organisational structure of English local government is fiendishly complex). And we compared that to the performance of Conservative-controlled councils. Data on housing construction by local authority do not match up perfectly with data on which party controls what council, so all our results should be interpreted as a rough estimate.
Our research suggests that in absolute terms, the performance of Labour councils is indeed better. On average they increased the total stock of housing in their local authority by 3,000 in 2010-16. The Tories did so by 2,000 over the same period.
And yet. Labour-controlled councils tend to be bigger, so you would expect the absolute number to be higher anyway. Surely what really matters is the proportional increase in housing stock. And here, Labour does less well. We calculate that since 2010 the housing stock in Labour councils rose by 3.5%, slightly lower than the 4% in Tory-controlled ones.
Even more surprisingly, it seems to be a similar story with the construction of council housing, which Mr Corbyn speaks about constantly on the campaign trail. The number of council houses has fallen across the country in recent years. But since 2010 the stock in Labour councils has on average fallen by 9%, compared with 6% in Tory-controlled ones. In claiming to be the party of the housebuilders, Labour may be living off its past reputation.
Speakers’ Corner
Apr 28th 2017
