Leeds tenants to get nearly £8,000 in compensation as demolition works approved

Alderton Heights in Alwoodley and Gipton Gate in east Leeds, which is split across two separate sites, will be mothballed over the next three years.

The blocks were put up as council housing in the 1960s, and the local authority says it’s now cheaper to knock them down and rebuild modern homes in their place than to refurbish them.

Those displaced by the demolition will be compensated with payments of around £7,800 each, a meeting of senior councillors on Wednesday was told.

They will also be given priority on the council house waiting list.

Councillor Mohammed Rafique, the local authority’s executive member for housing, said: “Creating new modern housing on the sites would be lower cost and lower risk than refurbishment.

“We’ve actually carried out very positive residents’ engagement sessions.

“We’ve consulted with three quarters of the residents and most of them are fairly positive.”

Gerard Tinsdale, the chief officer of the council’s housing department, said people would be moved out of the blocks gradually, so as not to leave just a handful of tenants in a near-empty block.

He told the meeting: “We don’t want this to take more than two years to empty blocks in their entirety.

“We also don’t want the odd individual left in there.

“So we want to phase the allocations so we can, for example, remove a floor at a time in there, so we don’t have people left suffering from vandalism or anti-social behaviour or anything like that.”