You don’t live in temporary accommodation for years. You live one week, over and over again.
For families on housing waiting lists across London, that week is all too familiar.
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One week of telling your child to keep their school uniform folded on a chair because there isn’t a wardrobe. One week of doing homework on a bed that doubles as a dining table. One week of keeping your voice down because the walls are thin and nothing ever feels like yours.
And while families are living like this, the Greens are blocking the homes they need.
Green politicians have opposed tens of thousands of new homes, including social and affordable housing – at least 49,000 by the latest count.
They turn up to marches. They post statements. They talk about fairness and the housing crisis. But when it comes to actually building homes, they oppose, delay or vote them down.
This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. Across London, proposals to build are met with Green campaigns to stop them. Regeneration schemes resisted. Planning applications challenged. Developments voted down.
This is not accidental. It is baked into local Green Party policy. A politics that treats development as something to resist, rather than something to shape and deliver.
The consequences are not abstract.
They are the families living that same week, over and over again. Children doing homework on beds. Parents trying to create stability in a single room. Lives put on hold because the homes they need have been blocked, delayed or never built at all.
That is the reality any serious housing policy has to confront.
Because this is where the Greens’ approach collapses. You cannot claim to stand for renters while opposing the homes renters need. You cannot talk about fairness while blocking the very developments that would give families a secure place to live.
That is not serious politics. It is protest without responsibility.
Of course, building homes is not easy. It means making difficult decisions. It means reforming a planning system that too often frustrates progress. It means backing councils and communities to deliver, even when there is opposition. Above all, it means being honest that if you want to solve the housing crisis, you have to build.
That is the difference with Labour.
We are reforming planning rules to get spades in the ground. Investing in a new generation of social and affordable homes. Strengthening renters’ rights so people have security while they wait. Working with councils across London to deliver at scale.
Because for so many working families in London, a permanent home is the lighthouse on the hill. Something steady. Something secure. Something to build a life around.
Politics can offer them that. But only if we move beyond protest and into delivery.
Because in the end, the test is simple.
If you are not willing to build the homes people need, you are choosing to leave families in precarity – and there is nothing progressive about that.
Steve Reed is Labour MP Streatham and Croydon North and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government
