Providing Fairer, Greener Homes for All

Everyone needs a warm, secure and affordable home. Yet millions of people don’t have this most basic building-block for a happy and successful life. Over a million households are on council waiting lists and more than 130,000 children are growing up in temporary accommodation.

Our Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price Charter

Local authorities and national government need to work together to deliver homes people can afford to rent or buy, where people need them. Our Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price Charter will simultaneously protect valuable green space for communities, reduce climate emissions, tackle fuel poverty and provide genuinely affordable housing. It would:

• Require local authorities to spread small developments across their areas.
• Require all new developments to be accompanied by the extra investment needed in local health, transport and other services.
• Ensure that all new homes meet Passivhaus or equivalent standards and house builders include solar panels and heat pumps on all new homes, where appropriate.

Our Fairer, Greener Homes Guarantee

Our energy bills are far too high because we have the worst-insulated homes in Europe. We would bring down bills by reducing the loss of heat from homes, because the cheapest bill is the one you don’t have to pay.

Elected Greens will push for a local-authority-led, street-by-street retrofit programme to insulate our homes, provide clean heat and start to adapt our buildings to more extreme climate conditions. This would mean investment of:

• £29bn over the next five years to insulate homes to an EPC B standard or above as part of a ten-year programme.
• £4bn over the next five years to insulate other buildings to a high standard
• £9bn over the next five years for low-carbon heating systems (e.g. heat pumps) for homes and other buildings

150,000 new social homes each year

We pledge to provide 150,000 new social homes every year through:

• New build and the purchase/refurbishment of older housing stock.
• A community right to buy for local authorities for several categories of property.
• Ending the individual ‘right to buy’, to keep social homes for local communities in perpetuity.

Our Fair Deal for Renters

Millions of private renters face unaffordable rents and constant insecurity.

Green MPs will push for:

• Rent controls so local authorities can control rents if the rental market is unaffordable for many local people.
• A new stable rental tenancy and an end to no-fault evictions so tenants are secure in their homes and don’t have their lives turned upside down on the whim of their landlords. We will also introduce a tenants’ right to demand energy efficiency improvements.
• Private residential tenancy boards to provide an informal, cheap and speedy forum for resolving disputes before they reach a tribunal.