Affordable homes for local people

Affordable homes for local people has to be the #1 priority for Mid & South Pembrokeshire’s next Labour MP. The elements of a solution are there: the council’s housebuilding plan, and the Welsh government’s council tax hike on second homes. But the important next steps have to come from Westminster.

We need an increase in the block grant to Wales from Westminster, so that it can fund a programme of council and social housebuilding alongside its commitments to schools.

And we need new powers for local councils to borrow to invest.

We also need to give councils the power to block inappropriate holiday lets, and promote community and co-operative house-building projects.

That’s what I will fight for at Westminster – as part of a comprehensive plan to redistribute wealth to working people.

Wealth redistribution

Child poverty in Pembrokeshire stands at 29% – the highest ever. And that’s before the figures for 2022 have been calculated. And according to a recent poll, some 41% of local people couldn’t afford to turn the heating on when cold.

That’s what 13 years of Tory government have delivered. The answer is to redistribute wealth.

I want to see a Labour government close tax loopholes worth billions a year, and to pledge the extra money to revolutionising health, social care, local councils, defence and the green transition. We need to start taxing wealth as well as incomes, and adopt the steeply progressive tax principles of the successful post-war Labour governments.

That’s how we pay for a major increase to the block grant Wales gets from Westminster. It’s how we fund councils to start building council housing.

We need to promote redistribution through every channel: rising real wages, universal basic services, making the essentials like transport and social care cheap or free; reform welfare and the tax system to create the beginnings of a basic income scheme, as the Welsh government has done for care leavers.

Labour doesn’t just need to win an election. Like the Attlee government of 1945, we need to establish a new consensus: for an economic model that puts people and planet before the interests of high finance.

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