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As part of our social policy package, we plan to apply rent controls nationwide. This is important to prevent UBI from becoming principally beneficial to landlords. Instead, we want a “new deal” for everyone – a system where everyone gains.

With that in mind, we will legislate to encourage fair, democratic, cooperative or community ownership of homes; it will also be necessary to relax the law around the registration of mutuals and cooperatives generally to enable this.

We will also fight tooth & nail to increase the number of both permanent and temporary pitches for the GRT community, and seek to legislate to protect their right to their way of life in line with the recommendations of regional and national direct democratic participatory assemblies led by and composed of those same communities.

We will legislate to improve legal protections for renters based on the input of renters unions such as Acorn, Living Rent, and others.

We will create legislation to allow the State to take ownership of uninhabitable, uninhabited property, and fund the restoration of that property where appropriate for social housing stock. Meanwhile, we will introduce tax benefits for landlords who carry out necessary works to ensure occupancy of their properties.

We will introduce “Lifetime Homes” – the requirement that “new build” houses must be built under the assumption that disabled people or the elderly will sooner or later live in them.

We will repeal the Vagrancy Act in full, decriminalising homelessness.

We will reorganise the national approach to homelessness. We will establish a new national homelessness monitoring team, with regional subteams, intended to first create a full picture of homelessness in Britain, and, then via both consultation with those teams and by way of accessing preexisting third sector knowledge, we intend to apply maximum leverage to end homelessness in Britain once and for all – with progressive social policies and by providing housing.

All of the above is part of a pattern of working hard on making the idea that “everyone should have a warm, safe place to shelter and call home” a reality – something we’ll be working towards at a local level before we ever get a foothold in Parliament. But there’s a lot more to come.

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