andyb, I'm obliged to you for that clarification over the number of council houses to be built. I suspect most readers recognised the hyperbole, and in effect it matters little. The suggested building programme is far too ambitious for the available workforce and budget.
Traditionally, council housing was built to a good standard, partly because they built better houses anyway, and partly because it was important to minimise the cost of ongoing maintenance, thus saving the taxpayers' purse. Ex-council houses in my area were much sought after due to the much larger room sizes, the better build quality, gardens, and proximity to local services.
Following the crash in 2008 some "mainstream" house builders tried to offload excess stock onto local authorities, but they didn't want these flashy, crappy boxes, as they were in the main of poor build quality, and just scraping through BCs standards. Ongoing maintenance was a big issue here, so few LAs took the bait, preferring to get smaller builders to undertake small developments for them, of better quality and with a smaller profit margin. This worked quite well, as the small firms needed the work and could keep going on tighter margins, not having the heavy overheads of the large companies, and without shareholder pressure.
All I was really saying was that Labour's manifesto is completely unrealistic as to the possibility of building so many houses, funding those builds, finding the land, finding the labour to construct and fit them out to a decent standard. If they release greenbelt land and let any Tom Dick or Harry bash them up, we will end up with huge estates of substandard houses that will come back to haunt us in years to come.
Mainstream builders will not be interested as there is no real profit in it for them-they like a profit from every unit right away. The government will get a return, of course, but it will be spread over a very long period.
