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LABOUR were urged by housing experts yesterday to cap rent rises for the whole of the next Parliament if they take power in May.
Freezing rent rises at inflation for the next five years was among policies proposed by the Class think tank to end Britain’s housing crisis.
Scrapping Thatcher’s right-to-buy scandal and replacing sold council houses by building 200,000 homes for social rents every year is also proposed.
Report author Marjorie Mayo said: “Decent housing is a right and inequality of access to affordable housing is an injustice that a new government must remedy.”
Labour could hit the target by removing restrictions on local council borrowing to allow them to build the social housing.
The proposals were drawn up by Ms Mayo and co-author Ines Newman after an in depth study of the housing shortage in two London boroughs.
And Ms Newman said: “Displacement and dispossession in south-east England are increasing fears for poorer families suffering from the effects of austerity and welfare cuts.
“And in the north, poor-quality private rented homes, the bedroom tax and derelict empty houses undermine aspirations and economic recovery.”
The Class report comes as Unison Scotland reveals how frontline housing staff are struggling to cope with the scale the crisis.
Unison spokesman Mark Ferguson: “We have a crisis with the availability, the cost and the quality of our housing and we urgently need a large-scale investment to reverse Scotland’s housing crisis.”
