Manchester City Council has become the first council to call for urgent action from the government on the housing emergency.
Councillor Angela Moran, along with Councillor Sam Lynch, presented their motion on October 5. Councillor Moran’s speech began: “a secure, stable, and affordable home should be a basic right, yet a national housing crisis, and now a cost of living emergency has made this basic right a privilege. But this council does not stand for privilege. It stands for fairness, and today, with this motion, it has an opportunity to make our City’s housing system fairer and support our most vulnerable residents at a time of crisis”.
She continued, noting that 15,000 people are currently on social housing waitlists, waiting years for a council house. While they wait, she argued, they are at the mercy of “rising rents” and “under-regulated tenancies”.
The motion called “for the acceleration of the Manchester Housing Strategy”, which aims to build 36,000 new homes by 2032. 10,000 of these are to be social and affordable housing, and 3000 of these will be built in the city centre.
Second, the motion called for the council’s executive to lobby the government to pass bills that would provide “urgent relief” to those “caught in the grimmest cracks of our housing crisis”. The motion carried unanimously.
The passing of the motion received praise from Shelter, a national charity which exists to “defend the right to a safe home”. The charity tweeted, praising the council, in particular Councillor Moran, for pushing the motion and encouraged “other councils to do the same”.
The housing crisis also extends to students. On September 28, The Mancunion reported that due to oversubscription, students at the University of Manchester students had been housed, and continued to live, in Liverpool.
