The Greens have launched their local elections campaign with a pledge to push for rent controls and a mass programme of council houses built to “Passivhaus” environmental standards, with the party predicting further gains on 4 May. The co-leaders of the Green party in England and Wales, Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer, set out the housing policies in Stowmarket, where the party hopes the local council, Mid Suffolk, could become the first where it gains majority control next month. In recent local elections the Greens have taken numerous seats from Labour in urban areas, but are increasingly targeting Conservative-held rural councils and former Tory voters who, Ramsay said, felt taken for granted. “There’s a clear sense on doorsteps around the country that people are disillusioned with the Conservatives and uninspired by Labour, and looking for an alternative,” said Ramsay, who is the Greens’ candidate for the newly created seat of Waveney Valley, which includes much of the Mid Suffolk district. “We expected our success against Labour to continue, but we also expect to see substantial growth from the Conservatives, including in places like Suffolk – we are very clearly main challengers to the Conservatives in most of rural Suffolk.”
The party’s housing pledge would include rent controls, to limit increases, and a plan to build 100,000 council homes a year, each to the Passivhaus or equivalent standard, under which strict insulation and energy efficiency standards would reduce the cost of bills. Wider changes to planning laws would require all new housing, whether public or private, to meet similar efficiency standards and to have solar panels and heat pumps fitted. The plan also calls for new housing developments to only be built with a matching investment in local infrastructure, including schools, GP surgeries and sustainable transport. Housing was, Ramsay said, “the big issue” in rural areas, as well as in towns and cities. Opposition parties have sometimes accused Green councillors of nimbyism for opposing developments. But Ramsay said it was simply a case of seeking the right sort of housing, not just speculative developments that did not benefit the community. “People see expensive new homes being built around them that are out of their reach, so they are priced out of their own community, often without the investment in the local infrastructure that is needed to support them, and often not to the right environmental standard,” he said. Next month’s vote involves seats across England last fought in 2019, when the Greens staged the first in a recent series of big successes in local elections, winning nearly 200 extra seats. Ramsay, who took over the leadership with Denyer 18 months ago, said that even in this context, the party was “confident of further substantial gains”, saying that success would be seen as at least another 100 extra seats. Much of the Greens’ recent success in local elections, he said, was down to energetically campaigning in long-term Conservative and Labour strongholds where the incumbent party had become used to automatic success. “They have had councillors and MPs for decades who are out of touch with what the community needs. They’ve never been challenged electorally before, so they get complacent,” he said. “And they often don’t know what to do when Greens come along and start campaigning. Their response is sometimes to put out a leaflet that copies Green party branding, but that doesn’t really work.”