Housing Justice
We believe that local families have a fundamental right to good quality housing, both for purchase and rent, in their own communities and at a price that is truly affordable to people of Cornish wages.
MK is proud to have campaigned on housing issues for many decades. But there has been a housing crisis in Cornwall for twenty years, which is worse now than ever before.
The housing market is dysfunctional and completely out of control. The cost of housing, both for purchase and rent, has rocketed, creating a massive mismatch between local wages and the cost of housing.
Private rented properties are getting increasingly difficult to find and extremely expensive because of the rise of airbnbs, while getting a ‘council house’ is but a distant dream for the many thousands in housing need.
The market was fractured by the Thatcherite sell-off of council houses in the 1980s. And it has been worsened by the actions of recent governments, which has massively slashed investment in affordable housing, replaced the social rent model with a new ‘affordable rent’ model that sets rents at 80% of the inflated cost of private sector rents, allowed tax-breaks for buy-to-let investors’, and reinvigorated the ‘right-to-buy’ of council houses.
They have even raised the threshold to trigger affordable housing on smaller sites and undermined the ability of Councils to provide for the needs of their communities, while large house-builders have posted record profits.
Mebyon Kernow is campaigning for:
- A planning system which focuses on providing local-needs affordable housing – not large amounts of open market housing to benefit speculative builders.
- The development of council houses as a priority, alongside initiatives to increase the number of proper affordable homes through registered providers, charities, co-operatives and Community Land Trusts.
- Legislation to halt and reverse the spread of second and holiday homes, as well as additional local taxation on those properties which are not permanently occupied.
- Legislation to halt and reverse the spread of airbnbs.
