IF every local authority in the country adopted the policy of the Swindon Labour Group and aimed to build hundreds – if not thousands – of council houses over the next five years, the housing crisis would be fixed.

That is the belief of Labour MP and shadow housing secretary John Healey, who was in town yesterday speaking to his party’s councillors and parliamentary candidates as well as housing professionals, campaigners and tenants advocates.

After a round table discussion, Mr Healey told the Advertiser: “The Conservative council here has built no new council houses at all in the last three years. It has spent £400,000 on a housing company set up to build houses for sale that hasn’t built any houses.

“I think Swindon deserves better and want to say to the people of Swindon that I want them to see the difference between this Conservative council and a Labour one that will act to build more houses and provide the housing needed here.”

Jim Grant, the Labour group leader at the Euclid Street council chamber who hopes to become leader of the whole council after May 3 said the extra housing would be paid for through using the money the council receives from selling under right to buy legislation.

Mr Healey said: “The lifting of the housing cap is a policy that we have urged the government to bring in for a long time. Now that it has been lifted, this allows councils like Swindon to be able to use that money to build the homes that are needed.”

The MP for Wentworth and Dearne in Yorkshire was housing minister in the last years of Gordon Brown’s government before the 2010 election.

He said that just before the election, there was more investment in social housing than for a generation.

“If the Conservatives had carried on doing that after the 2010 election there would be 180,000 more houses across the country today. That’s enough to house everyone – every homeless person.”

Labour councillor and spokesman on housing Emma Bushell was part of the discussions with Mr Healey.

She said she would welcome his promise of greater powers for councils to licence and regulate private landlords.

“A high percentage of privately rented housing is sub-standard, and we’d want to be able to go after the worst landlords and enforce improvements,” she said. “That enforcement would be self-sustaining in terms of cost using the fines levied on those landlords.”

Coun Bushell is standing in Walcot and Park North on May 2, opposed by Steve Halden (UKIP), Dawn Pajak (Lib Dem), and Roy Stephen (Conservative).