Stewart Golton: Is Leeds's housing policy fit for purpose?

Since people got the vote, politicians have recognised the need for them to get involved to make it happen.

In the last century, we had “homes for heroes” after the war, slum clearances, garden suburbs, and “new towns” like Milton Keynes.

Often, the results were controversial in quality of construction or architecture, but the will was there to get them built.

And now? Unfortunately, politicians are more of a problem than a solution, and I’ll share a couple of shameful situations that make my point:

The area I represent had a lot of people working down the 
pit, and seventy families still live in ex-Coal Board houses in Oulton.

They rent their homes now from a landowner based in Worcestershire, who plans to demolish these properties and rebuild the same number of executive homes for sale.

The families affected, the majority with local jobs and children in nearby schools, have no prospect moving to a nearby home as Council and private rented homes are scarce, and a mortgage is not within their means.

Is it morally defensible to allow so many families to be uprooted for a development that would not add a single extra house locally, but will reduce the supply of affordable homes for families in need?

If development policy intended for housing growth delivers the opposite, it is not fit for purpose.

However, my request for the Housing Minister to intervene has been met with silence.

Increasingly, the only option to keep people in their homes would be for the Council to dig deep and buy the homes out, a prospect they are currently shying away from.

However, the Council is involved in an even bigger housing controversy of its own making.

Driven my the desire to shore up overspent Council budgets, Leeds Council bosses announced the biggest 
housing growth target in the country.

70,000 homes would generate a lot of Council tax, especially if they were of a higher Council tax band.

Hence why swathes of greenbelt land were released, in the midst of stiff local opposition, in the hope of attracting developers to 
build.

However, income raised from new homes is below expectations, and builders are still putting forward smaller inappropriate developments like that already mentioned in Oulton.

Big developers build to suit their shareholders, not the community, so why do we rely on them to deliver our housing ambitions?

Big developers tell us that they can’t build more affordable homes or bungalows because they have to make 20 per cent profit, as that’s the interest rate on their finance.

Local Councils have access to historically low interest rates.

Housing development companies owned by councils can deliver affordable homes both for sale and for rent and I will be proposing this for Leeds in the Liberal Democrat amendment.

If we can deliver the kind of homes that people want and can afford, we should grab that opportunity.

If the government is serious about delivering housing on the ground, they should be backing us to do it too.

Stewart Golton, leader of the Leeds City Council Liberal Democrat group