Latest editorial
HOUSING Secretary Sajid Javid’s declared backing for Karen Buck’s private member’s Bill to empower tenants to sue landlords for failing to keep homes fit for human habitation could be an important step forward.
It would mark a major U-turn by the Tories who previously scuppered two attempts by the Labour backbencher to achieve this reform.
Buck’s first bid to amend the 1985 Landlord and Tenant Act to require residential rented accommodation to be “provided and maintained in a state of fitness for human habitation” was talked out by Tory MPs in 2015.
Our housing crisis isn’t an accident – it’s class war, trapping millions in poverty while landlords and billionaires profit. To solve it, we need comprehensive transformation, not mere tokenistic reform, writes BECK ROBERTSON
GLYN ROBBINS celebrates how tenant-led campaigning forced the government to drop Pay to Stay, fixed-term tenancies and council home sell-offs under Cameron — but warns that Labour’s faith in private developers will require renewed resistance