Four in five councils have decade-long waiting lists for social homes as Lib Dems call for planning reforms
Liberal Democrat housing spokesperson Helen Morgan has called for the Government to invest £1.9 billion in new social housing project.
Helen Morgan MP told GB News: “We think we need a really ambitious target of building up to 150,000 social homes a year to get people out of dangerous private rented situations and into appropriate housing.
Last year, the Conservative [Levelling-Up] department gave back £1.9 billion to the Treasury because it hadn't been able to spend it on housing projects.
“So, we think that money is there. We just think it needs to be deployed and we need to get people into safe and secure housing.”
Asked if her party’s policies on immigration would exacerbate the current housing crisis, she said: “No. I think every government has said that we need to build housing at scale, that we need to be building at least 300,000 homes a year. We've failed to do that repeatedly over decades.
“We haven't built housing at scale since the 1950s and that's why we've got millions of people, 1.2 million people, on social housing waiting lists, families that will have inappropriate housing they're living in.
“Seven people in a two-bedroom house is one case that I'm trying to deal with at the moment.
“We need to recognise that young people need somewhere to live. Immigration is a factor, but it's not the primary driver. We have just failed to build housing for the modern generation.
“I think we all recognise that there are people coming to this country because the Government have chosen to, for example, allow care workers or recruit care workers from abroad, rather than valuing our own care-working profession, paying it properly, giving it proper career ladder, and instead rely on overseas improvement, and that's led to high levels of immigration.
“We need to change that. We need to value our care sector properly and make it a desirable career for the people who are here to go into.
“But we also need to deal with the problem of illegal migration, of criminal gangs exploiting some of the most vulnerable people in the world.
“We've said repeatedly, let's invest in the Home Office to deal with the backlog of those claims. Let's sort out safer legal routes to break up those criminal gangs, and let's work internationally to try and reduce the problem of people moving around, perhaps unnecessarily.”
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