Bristol West’s hotly tipped prospective MP Molly Scott Cato has launched a new strategy for addressing Bristol’s housing crisis.

The strategy rejects the argument that the housing crisis can be solved simply by building lots of new homes, with the Greens blaming the city’s housing crisis on “treating homes as investments”, and the sell-off and a lack of investment in new council homes.

Scott Cato said that the strategy contains the “building blocks for a housing revolution” in the city.

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Bristol West Green Party candidate Molly Scott Cato launches her housing policy for Bristol Posted by Bristol24/7 on Friday, 19 May 2017

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The report was jointly written by Scott Cato and Bristol South parliamentary candidate Tony Dyer..

Greens want to see a move away from short-term tenancies, enabling renters to stay in their home as long as they pay their rent and abide by their contract, and a “living rent” where rents are capped to within one third of the take-home pay of the average household.

They also call for new powers for Bristol City Council and the mayor in regulating the local rental market, as in many cities across Europe, and call for an end to tax breaks for landlords’ mortgages and schemes like Help to Buy

Scott Cato said that public money currently going towards these schemes should instead be put towards delivering more genuinely affordable housing, saying that the council should be free to borrow prudently to build new council housing and to use its large land holdings and pension fund to back community-led approaches like community land trusts, cooperatives and co-housing.

Scott Cato said: “As Green MP I would work to put in place the building blocks of a housing revolution in Bristol, working with residents and campaign groups to make the case for creating a fairer housing market, where younger and older generations; home owners or renters, all have equal opportunities for decent affordable homes.”

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