Labour backs plan to seize ’empty private homes’ and introduce state control of property prices

Labour would seize private family homes and introduce price controls into the market in a bid to tackle the UK’s housing crisis under a plan passed by party members today.

Delegates at the party conference in Brighton also committed the party to a 20-year council house-building blitz creating two million homes as part of a sweeping plan to revolutionise the way people live if it wins a general election.

A 32-measure motion was passed unanimously at end of the event after MPs and senior figures had flooded back to Westminster to attend the re-opened Parliament.

The ‘composite’ motion, brought by the local part in South East Cornwall and backed by Young Labour.

It came after Jeremy Corbyn, in his speech to the conference yesterday, said Labour wants to start the ‘largest council house building programme in a generation’.

He said: ‘No more tinkering around the edges, because these aren’t abstract numbers on a spreadsheet – they stand for an economic transformation that will change your daily life.’ 

Delegates at the party conference in Brighton also committed the party to a 20-year council house-building blitz creating two million homes as part of a sweeping plan to revolutionise the way people live if it wins a general election

It commits the party to building at least 100,000 council houses every year for two decades as part of a plan to build at least 3.1 million ‘social homes’.

It also calls for ‘a commitment to stabilising nominal housing prices’.

In a move that may alarm private home owners, it also says the party would ‘requisition by compulsory purchase order empty private homes, including unoccupied tower blocks in London (as in Berlin and Vancouver), as well as the worst private rented sector properties’.

No-fault evictions would be banned and ‘affordable rent’ rates would be linked to local income in a raft of measures designed to assist tenants.