By With a general election little over a month away, the Labour Party has unveiled plans for some of the most significant upgrades to the UK’s housing stock since the 1940s, as part of its Warm Homes for All initiative, to ensure a new generation of green homes.
Labour aims to help reduce carbon emissions, cut energy bills and create 450,000 new jobs by 2030, by introducing a raft of energy-saving measures to boost loft-insulation and double-glazing, while making homes less reliant on fossil fuels.
Ambitious targets proposed
Labour intends for its new green housing policies to help cut carbon emissions by 10 per cent by 2030, and reduce energy bills for 9.6 million low-income households, by an average of £417 for each of these households per year.
Plans to upgrade homes, to give them better insulation and improve overall energy efficiency were estimated to be likely to create 250,000 skilled jobs in the construction industry, with much of the new economic activity being centred around insulation specialists, electricians, window fitters and gas engineers.
Labour also used its green proposals to claim that an additional 200,000 jobs would be created through government investment across the country, but did not specify where these jobs would come from.
The shift towards more sustainable homes by Labour is intended not only to ensure that the UK can reduce carbon emissions, but also to help reduce the number of winter deaths, which are often linked to ill health caused by cold homes.
Labour’s green proposals come as something of a response to the government’s own plans for more environmentally-friendly homes in recent weeks. In late October, the government revealed proposals to create a ‘construction corridor’ in the North of England, planning to make it the hub for a new generation of modular homes.
Election draws closer
These new housing policies from Labour come mere days before Parliament is expected to be dissolved, ahead of a general election, on Thursday 12th December. Barely a month or so after Parliament reconvened following a short-lived prorogation, its dissolution will lead to an intense period of election campaigning.
Last week, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage offered an electoral pact to the Prime Minister, but this was rejected. In response, the Brexit Party announced that it expected to field 600 candidates in constituencies across the UK.
This comes, as a YouGov poll in the Sunday Times revealed last weekend that just seven per cent of voters expected to support the Brexit Party in a general election. This was down from 24 per cent of voters in a YouGov poll back in mid-June, before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister.
Mr Johnson aims to emerge from the election with a majority of seats in Westminster, as the Conservatives have been governing as a minority government with support from the DUP since June 2017. The election is to be the UK’s third in just four years.
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