Party to formally launch campaign in Manchester as Corbyn says he will continue as leader regardless of 8 June vote

Jeremy Corbyn has said his top priority is to build more council houses and introduce tougher regulation of the private rental sector – and insisted he was not downhearted after difficult local election results for his party last week.

Speaking to the Guardian as he was campaigning in the West Midlands, the Labour leader said the UK needed a serious national initiative to tackle the housing crisis, aimed in particular at helping younger and less well-off voters.

The party wants at least a million new homes built over the next five years, with half of them council houses, as part of a programme of borrowing for public investment. It has also committed to secure tenancies, stopping rip-off fees and unreasonable rent increases, and a charter of private tenants’ rights.

Asked for his number one priority, Corbyn said: “There are obviously many priorities but the crisis of housing and setting in train a housing programme that would build more council housing at socially affordable rents and ensuring there is proper regulation of the private rental sector is a very high priority for me.”



Play Video 3:29 Broadchurch actor introduces Jeremy Corbyn at Labour campaign launch – video

He said sorting out the crisis in the NHS, a new economic strategy focused on investment and getting a Brexit trade deal were other key issues. Corbyn also said that whatever happened in the 8 June vote he would be “carrying on” as Labour leader.

Corbyn’s remarks come as the main parties gear up their election campaigns to focus on consumer issues. Labour strategists believe housing is a core issue for “generation rent” who cannot afford to buy their own homes and struggle with soaring housing costs, with the Lyons Housing Commission finding that public concern about the issue is at its highest for 40 years.

There are more than a million people on housing waiting lists in England, while more than 6 million face tenure insecurity and no prospect of ever buying their own home, according to the ResPublica thinktank.

Meanwhile, Theresa May will on Tuesday pledge to intervene in the energy market with a price cap on rip-off rates. The Conservative manifesto will promise to place a ceiling on the standard variable tariff after a government-backed study found customers had been forced to pay £1.4bn a year in “excessive prices”.

The cap would be set by the regulator, Ofgem, and would be reset every six months in order to prevent it from limiting competition within the market. May referred to the policy at a campaign event in Harrow West on Monday where she argued that “capping energy prices to support working families” was in the “national interest”.

But the policy shift is likely to draw fierce criticism from Labour after the Tories attacked Ed Miliband’s energy price freeze in 2015 as evidence that he was living in a “Marxist universe”.

Labour will formally launch its election campaign in Manchester on Tuesday, where Corbyn will warn of a “reckoning for those who thought they could get away with asset stripping our industry, crashing our economy through their greed and ripping off workers and consumers during the financial crisis”.

He will challenge Labour to “ruin” the Conservative party and make the case over the next four weeks to “take our wealth back”.

“Don’t wake on up on 9 June to see celebrations from the tax cheats, the press barons, the greedy bankers, Philip Green, the Southern Rail directors and crooked financiers that take our wealth, who have got away with it because the party they own, the Conservative party, has won,” he will say.

On Monday, Corbyn told crowds in the Conservative-held areas of Worcester and Leamington Spa that he should not be written off because of May’s lead in the opinion polls.

Asked by the Guardian if he felt downhearted about last week’s local elections in which Labour lost 382 seats and the Conservatives surged in some of his party’s heartlands, he said: “Not at all. I don’t do downhearted.”

The party leader added: “I’m very ready. I’m campaigning on all the things we believe in very strongly. The membership is determined to get out there and do it. We had 1,000 people in Leicester on Saturday and you’ve seen the numbers who turned up here today.”

Following Corbyn’s comments on his future, first reported by BuzzFeed News, a senior Labour source said asking questions about his continued leadership was a “distraction from our plan to transform Britain for the many, not the few”.

Polls are currently showing double digit leads for the Conservatives and many Labour MPs, especially those with high Ukip votes in marginal constituencies, are fearful of losing their seats.



But Corbyn highlighted the initial odds of 200/1 against him becoming Labour leader.

He began a day of campaigning at a training school for student nurses in the bellwether seat of Worcester, before moving on to the town centre to address a rally of hundreds of supporters and members of the public and a second rally in Leamington Spa – stump speeches intended to contrast with May’s decision to hold private events for Conservative activists and speeches to employees at their workplaces.

Earlier, the Labour leader and his shadow cabinet unveiled two policies relating to the NHS: a ban on car parking charges in hospitals in England, paid for by a rise in insurance premium tax on private healthcare products, and an end to advertising of junk food aimed at children before the watershed.

Corbyn suggested Labour could look at more taxation of polluting vehicles to improve public health problems caused by poor air quality, as he expanded on the party’s desire to bring in a new clean air act. “A diesel scrappage scheme is a help but also emission controls on all vehicles and a taxation system that makes people pay for their pollution would certainly concentrate the mind a great deal. It is also about reducing the amount of traffic in cities.”

He said he would like to reverse cuts made to corporation tax by the Conservatives. “At the moment, we will reverse the process of cutting it to 17% but it won’t rise much more after that … what [the Conservatives] are doing is proposing a run down of corporation tax over the next five years. We would stop that process. We’re not going to race to the bottom and we’re certainly not going in the direction of the lowest rate in the EU, which is Ireland, and we are certainly going to look to more or less the average across Europe.”

With just over four weeks to go until the polls, the Labour leader told the Guardian that he would want to maintain a work-life balance if he were to be elected prime minister.

“I’m an incorrigible runner, cyclist and allotment gardener. Balancing life is important and I have all my life been very active at the job I’ve done but I’ve also made sure there is also a balance. I read quite widely and meet a lot of people who have nothing to do with politics a lot. I think reading and doing other things is important because it gives you more imagination and gives you a better appreciation of the views and motivations of others,” he said.

Asked whether he would move into No 10, he said: “Listen, we’re fighting a campaign to win. I’m very happy in the house I’ve got so let’s work it out when we get there.”