Steve Reed is one of the worst politicians the Labour Party has ever produced, which is really saying something. Although you may be more familiar with his recent attempts to smear the Green Party, Reed is actually Labour’s housing minister. The reason he’s more comfortable with the smears and slander is because he’s got nothing to brag about from his actual job:

Steve Reed boasting: “If you look at just last year, we built more council homes than in any year for 35 years”

In 2024-25 just 2,260 council homes were built & in the same period 8,656 were sold through right to buy. pic.twitter.com/QWItkmuxHb

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) May 5, 2026

Labour: Reed the room

As Saul Staniforth rightly points out, if you sell more housing stock than you build, you end up with less overall housing stock. In other words, Labour have nothing to boast about.

On the face of it, the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme sounds like the government doing us a favour. After all, purchasers receive a substantial discount on their homes. Over time, though, the scam becomes clear.

Governments from Margaret Thatcher onwards didn’t sell off council homes to be nice; they did it to put an end to social housing. Without social housing properties available, landlords rule the market and get to set prices.

As Common Wealth reported in August 2025:

There has been a deliberate and far-reaching reengineering of housing tenure in Britain. In the late 1970s, around 30 per cent of households in England lived in council housing, by 2023, just six per cent of homes were council housing.

They added:

Since then, successive governments have done very little to expand the council housing stock. The decline in council housing as a share of the overall housing stock has been a major driver of the housing crisis: it has reduced the supply of low cost rented housing and exposed more of the population to the higher rents and the insecurities of private renting.

Scam Britain

Common Wealth identified four key issues which resulted from the demise of social housing. Firstly, selling off council houses was always a bung to private landlords:

• Unaffordability: the decline of council housing provision has helped drive the growth in the private rented sector, where rents are considerably higher on average — the typical private tenant spends an average of 34 per cent of their income on rent (rising to 39.8 per cent in London), whereas this figure was only ten per cent of income in 1980. While private renters in England pay an average of £209 a week, for council tenants the equivalent figure is £100 a week.

This is what Landlord Zone reported after the 2024 election:

There are 85 MPs who declare themselves as landlords (13% of parliamentarians), owning 184 rental properties between them. Labour has 44 landlords, equating to 11% of its 404 MPs, while the Tory party has 28, a quarter of its 121 MPs, and the Liberal Democrats have eight among their 72 MPs.

So selling off council houses isn’t just a bung to landlords; it’s a bung to politicians.

This fucking country.

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Common Wealth also flagged the following (emphasis added):

• Insecurity: the decline in council housing has also left local authorities drastically under-resourced to adequately house people who are facing, or are at risk of, homelessness. This has led to an increased reliance on temporary accommodation (including from the private sector) — a form of accommodation which often lacks basic facilities and where overcrowding is common. Research from Shelter in 2023 found that one in five residents of temporary accommodation reported a safety hazard and three in four reported poor conditions. The Local Government Association estimates that the use of temporary accommodation rose by 89 per cent between 2013 to 2023. Consequently, the cost to councils has also almost doubled in the past five years. Councils spent a total of £2.3 billion on temporary accommodation in 2023-24.

So it’s yet another case of us having worse outcomes while providing a considerable bung to the private sector.

Common Wealth also flagged:

• Inaccessibility: the collapse of social housing provision has left vast numbers of households waiting for a social home. 1.29 million households are currently on social home waiting lists, with recent projections suggesting this figure could rise to two million within a decade. Meanwhile, according to the official estimates, rough sleeping has nearly tripled since 2010.

And finally:

• Inequality: our analysis finds that the estimated market value of the equity given away in Right To Buy discounts (given to tenants to incentivise the purchase of council housing) between 1980 and 2022/23 stands at approximately £194 billion. This represents a vast transfer of public wealth to private individuals. Furthermore, 41 per cent of homes sold under Right To Buy are now rented out in the private rented sector. We also find that Right To Buy is the second largest privatisation by market value in UK history, after land.

Selling off council houses hasn’t just made conditions better for landlords; it’s also bolstered their housing stock.

And Steve Reed is bragging about this.

The man from Labour Together

In Paul Holden’s The Fraud, the investigative journalist wrote the following about Reed:

Reed’s involvement in the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is both instructive and disturbing; indeed, he is one of the more chilling figures encountered in researching this book. Two things are worth noting here, both of which are set out in more detail later.

First, party files show that Reed had a history of accusing people of antisemitism on the basis of arguably tendentious evidence; as noted above, this included submitting complaints dossiers to the party that demanded the immediate suspension of four left-wing, anti-Zionist Jews. Party files also show that Reed submitted complaints about left-wing members of his local constituency, accusing them of antisemitism for, amongst other things, sharing factually accurate news stories.

For more on Reed’s history of using concocted antisemitism smears, be sure to watch the following from Double Down News:

Reed is yet another Labour chancer who’s good at smearing his rivals but terrible at delivering results. The sooner we’re rid of Starmer and this shower of shithouses the better.

Featured image via ITV

By Willem Moore

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