At the #NotOneDayMore rally on July 1st, Green Party’s Sian Berry called on Jeremy Corbyn to deal with Labour councils who continue to treat social housing tenants with disdain
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SIAN BERRY: The Grenfell disaster, this horror, this crime, it’s the worst thing I have every witnessed. The [inaudible 00:00:08] that have contributed to this horror and alarm in so many other buildings too are absolutely huge. Regulations, building standards, the kind of PFIs, the profit making deals that are done between counsels that mean you can’t even follow the paper trail to see what’s going on. We must treat the underlying disease that lead to these deaths not just the symptoms. The disease is the appalling attitude of so many of our authorities to people who live in social housing. I want to hear some solid words from Jeremy Corbyn about the conduct of labor counsels and a promise that he’ll get them behaving better too because this is not just a problem Tory counsels have. It’s not just about cuts. It’s about how they respect the tenants. Yes, counsels are treating tenants abominably in Lancaster West and Silchester and Kensington and Chelsea and on Cambridge Road in Kingston. But we also see the exact same thing on the Ellsbury and [Suffolk 00:01:10], Cressingham Gardens in Central Hill in London and with the Haringey [inaudible 00:01:15] which was just pushed through by labor counsel. If you haven’t yet, you must see the film, This Possession, which lays out how long term a project this is and how it’s been going on. We need counsels of all colors to drop their paternalistic disdain for what their citizens are saying to them about their homes. Yes, this is how we prevent future disasters, but it’s also, and to end more optimistically however hard that is at the moment, it’s also how we do really great things to solve the housing crisis. So Tories out, authority out, and we must listen to the people in future. Thank you.
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