John Healey MP, Shadow Cabinet Minister for Housing and Planning, has written to the Prime Minister today over plans debated yesterday in the Bill Committee for the Housing and Planning Bill to limit tenancies for council tenants to a maximum of five years.

Dear David

You have said you want to be a ‘one nation’ Prime Minister and lead the party ‘for working people’, but on housing you are doing exactly the opposite.

Your latest move in the Housing and Planning Bill to legislate to deny families a stable home by restricting council tenancies to a maximum of 5 years is just the latest attack on those who need an affordable home to rent or buy.

In the Housing and Planning Bill alone you are forcing the sale of tens of thousands of council homes to buy-to-let landlords and overseas speculators, pressing ahead with the extension of the right-to-buy without any plan to replace homes like-for-like in the local areas they are sold, hiking rents for working people on household incomes above £30,000 and effectively removing the long-standing obligation of private developers to build affordable homes to rent and buy.

This is a Bill to kill off affordable homes, and an attack on people on low and middle incomes who need them the most.

But this latest proposal isn’t just anti-affordable homes, its anti-aspiration too.

Your Minister made clear in committee that the circumstances of tenants will be reviewed to see if they deserve to stay in their home after the maximum five-year tenancy period.

This means that any measures that tenants take in that time to improve their situation – getting a job, or taking on an extra shift at work – could mean they’re deemed to not need their homes any more.

This is perverse. It’s the ultimate penalty for working families – get a job, and forfeit your home as a result.

I urge you to think again. This is an attack on stable family homes, and on tenants who are trying to improve their situation. Labour will oppose it.

Yours ever

John

John Healey MP