Cap rents. Build homes.

Last year, there were more people were made homeless in England than bought their first home.

Sky high rents, averaging £2.5k a month in London, mean that 49 per cent of children living in private rented homes in the capital live in poverty.

That’s why I support the call by Labour’s London mayor Sadiq Khan for powers to cap and control rents. We need to end the injustice of insecure tenancies, no fault evictions and unsafe homes. And I support calls by Generation Rent for a comprehensive set of rights and protections against unscrupulous landlords.

Rent controls alone won’t solve the problem but they could bring immediate relief: two-year rent freeze could save the average household £3,374.

The answer is a crash programme of homebuilding: social housing, council housing and affordable new homes with state-backed mortgage guarantees. To do that we’re going to need to invest.

I want to see a Labour government close tax loopholes worth billions a year. We need to start taxing wealth as well as incomes, and adopt the steeply progressive tax principles of the successful post-war Labour governments. I also want to see big disincentives for speculative development of the kind that is leaving homes unoccupied, with the lights off, while their owners pocket rising values.

That, plus a revolution in planning, is how we get Britain’s builders to build for the many, not the few.

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