Housing to be included on health and wellbeing boards, says Jack Dromey

Shadow minister Jack Dromey said the decoupling of housing and health in public policy has been a mistake. Photograph: Bob Fallon/guardian.co.uk

Housing representatives will be given a seat at local health and wellbeing boards under Labour plans to improve the integration between housing, health and social care, according to shadow housing minister Jack Dromey.

Speaking at the Labour conference at a Guardian fringe event sponsored by Moat housing association, Dromey said the decoupling of housing and health in public policy had been a mistake as good quality housing was "arguably the greatest contributor towards public health".

Local health and wellbeing boards were introduced in 2012 to bring together senior council staff, elected members and NHS staff to build partnerships, tackle health inequalities and improve how the sectors work together.

The announcement follows former health minister Paul Burstow's call for the housing minister role to be relocated to the Department of Health.

Dromey also announced a Labour government would scrap the "affordable rent" programme which determines the funding and rent levels of social housing, and would subsidise housing providers with grant funding and investment. But he added that a Labour government would be "very demanding" of how housing providers used the funding.

Moat chief executive Elizabeth Austerberry said reduced funding housing associations receive under the affordable rent programme had constrained the development of new affordable homes.

Opposition leader Ed Miliband said in his conference speech that Labour would introduce a use-it-or-lose-it ultimatum to developers to prevent land banking. Charles Seaford of the New Economics Foundation welcomed this but added: "You also have to be willing to designate land for housing that doesn't currently have planning permission.

"It's not up to people to apply, they just get it. You don't have a free market when it comes to land, essentially."

Photograph: Bob Fallon/guardian.co.uk

Former deputy prime minister John Prescott proposed a land-sharing agreement between local authorities and developers, in which councils retain ownership of the land but permit developers to build on it to reduce house prices by removing the land value from the total cost.

"Why don't [local authorities] keep the land?" said Prescott. "The building costs are say 50%, so let that be the mortgage. That's a £60,000 house. That's the rate of a deposit now in London."

The announcement that a Labour government would double the rate of housebuilding to 200,000 homes a year was warmly received, but Austerberry said less restrictive regulation would be required to increase the number of homes housing associations can build.

Austerberry called for more flexible tenures within the social housing sector: "Not only do we need to be building more units, we need to think of more ways that people can occupy those units depending on their financial circumstances and their lifestyle at any particular time," she said.

Dromey also repeated Labour's pledge to abolish the under-occupancy penalty, or bedroom tax as its known to critics.

"Once every generation there comes a tax so bad that the next generation looks back and asks the question 'why the bloody hell did they do it?'," he added.

Jack Dromey, Charles Seaford and Elizabeth Austerberry were speaking at the Labour party conference Guardian fringe event on 24 September. Read the housing cliff report here.

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