Street stall report

I was out with comrades from Coventry and Warwickshire Communist Party branch on Saturday in Coventry city centre campaigning about the housing crisis.

Our branch has launched a petition that demands an end to the social housing auction, calls for rent controls to stop sky rocketing rents and wants Coventry Council to build houses.

Until Thatcher and the Tories stopped building council housing in 1981, local authorities across this country were building on average over 100,000 dwellings a year. Now they are building virtually none.

Right to buy must be stopped as it is draining our housing stock and 41% of former council houses are now owned by people for 'buy to let' and charging their tenants rents that are 10 times higher than they would have paid if they had still been in council control!

The lack of housing means young people in particular are finding it hard to get a home; private rents are soaring, up by just short of 10% over the past year and 4.5m dwellings are damp, without insultation, cold and badly maintained.

Housing prices are constantly rising with the price of an average dwelling rising from £210,000 in 2020 to £270,000 now, as a result mortgages are unaffordable for many. There's a crisis in housing and we need more houses now and not these so called 'executive homes' built by greedy developers. We need family homes that working class people can afford to buy or rent.