I suspect I'm not the only person in this room who finds it galling to be lectured by Tories and their Lib Dem allies about how best to spend
Labour Government money. It was their Tory Government that, for nearly two decades, left our estates and the people who live on them to rot in the first
place.
I've been listening to tonight's debate, and this much is clear to me. The Tories and Liberals are obsessed with procedure and playing
politics. Well we're obsessed with improving people's lives.
I’ve been visiting families living in the kind of housing this Labour Council wants to improve. One mother showed me the smelly, leaking
bathroom where she has to wash her children. Another showed me the damp and the dry rot on her children’s bedroom wall. An older person told me she didn’t want
to spend another winter without central heating. And a man worried about arthritis showed me the draughty, rotten windows that let in the cold that makes him feel
worse. Over 10,000 families in this borough put up with conditions like that. Quite simply, in the 21st century in one of the richest cities on
earth, that is not acceptable.
Labour's going to put it right. That will cost the Council over £200 million – money that we don’t have. The Liberals and
Tories ran this Council for four years, and in that time they never came up with a single plan to bring in the money we need. Four years and all they delivered was a £3 million
fraud scandal and a housing service left £10 million in debt. It took this Labour Administration just a few weeks before we put in a bid for the money that will change those
people’s lives.
Labour believes in involving tenants. That’s why we held a ballot to seek their support. Remember the demands for a
ballot the Liberals ignored before they forced the disaster of 'housing reframing' on us? Remember how they said there should be a referendum before putting up council tax, and
then put it up 40% without one? The Liberals weren’t in favour of democracy when they were in power. And they’re not in favour of democracy in opposition
either. Because tonight they want to overturn the decision tenants made. In the ballot, more people voted yes than voted no. It’s that
simple. And since they’r’e not actually offering any credible alternative, I can only conclude the reason the Liberals don’t like the result is they don’t want to see Labour
putting right the failure they left behind.
But more shocking for me was the way the Liberals behaved during the ballot. After the elections last year I announced that tackling
inequality was now a priority for this Council. That certainly wasn’t how the Liberals had run the Council, but they were quick to claim they now believed the
same. Well square that with what they said during the ALMO ballot. They put out leaflets with headlines saying “seven out of ten get no
money”. It’s not even accurate, but they were attacking the fact that the money would be targeted on those living in the worst conditions. They used that
as a reason to tell people living in better homes to vote against improvements for people living in the worst homes
That’s not a commitment to tackling inequality. It’s a blatant attempt to divide the better off from the worst off, and it disgraces a party
that claims to believe in social justice.
We will not be ignoring the way tenants voted. We will be targeting support on those in greatest need. And
that’s because we mean it when we say that social justice matters.
Let the Liberals peddle their bankrupt politics. Let them call their pointless meetings. These Liberals have shown
they are irrelevant to solving the problems facing people living in this borough. And when the money comes through, when the work begins, when people’s lives improve because they
now have a Labour council, we will be out there reminding tenants how the Liberals opposed every penny of it every step of the way.
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