Prentis leads Congress call to arms

"What is so wrong with councils building council housing," general secretary Dave Prentis asked TUC delegates in Brighton this morning, as he moved a call for Congress to campaign on affordable housing."What is so wrong with councils renewing their housing stock? Councils doing what they do best: offering local communities the housing they want, the homes they need; respecting tenants' choice?"Congress agreed that there was nothing wrong in that at all, urging the general council to lead a campaign for:
affordable solutions to the housing shortage, including new homes for social rent;
expanding the options for real low-cost home ownership;
councils being able to bring existing houses up to standard and build new ones;
tenant and community involvement in housing programmes. The scale of the problem was revealed when Mr Prentis pointed out that nurses can afford to buy homes in just 1% of British towns, and just 22% of towns are affordable for teachers."If nurses and teachers can't afford it, how on earth will our cleaners, our teaching assistants, our porters, survive?" he asked."We have to do more to reverse the record where the national spend is the second lowest in the developed world."And Mr Prentis made no apology for linking the housing need with public-service workers' need for better pay."Access to decent homes means access to decent pay," he stated. "That is why it is so wrong that hard working public servants should be made to bear the brunt of government cost-cutting."And that is why UNISON, together with all other public-service unions, will stand up and fight for the right of our members to decent pay awards - not just this year, but next year and the year after that."Decent homes and decent pay: our members deserve nothing less and we will accept nothing less."