‘City should be building new homes by the thousand’

THERE IS HUGE DEMAND, SAY HOUSING CHIEFS

DERBY’S housing officials hope to reach a point where the city is building new estates containing thousands of homes each year, similar to Mackworth and Alvaston.

A Derby City Council housing and regeneration meeting on Monday was told that in the past year 236 affordable homes have been built, an increase from last year and more than double the year before.

But there are currently around 4,000 people waiting for homes on the city council’s waiting list.

Councillors were also told that there are a number of difficulties in securing new affordable homes in the city and also that there were ambitions for far loftier numbers of homes.

Shaun Bennett, director of investment and regeneration at Derby Homes, said: “When you think back to the late 1940s, early 1950s, we’ve got councillors who are in your position in those days buying hundreds of acres of land that become Mackworth and Alvaston and Chaddesden Park.

“If we think back to our ancestors, they were building at one point 2,500 to 3,000 council houses a year in the city, amazing stuff really, and if we can get anywhere near that – I mean conditions are different now – but with ambition we need to be trying to get some way towards that.

“We need to look at securing private land for new builds. We need to get the land to be able to build what the city really needs.

“That is the biggest challenge really over the last few years, land that is big enough to build more than a pair or more than four homes, that is really going to make a difference.”

Ian Fullagar, head of strategic housing at the city council, said that the authority, with Derby Homes, was tackling the hardest sites in the city to develop: “Small sites that if we don’t pick them up, no-one will.”

This also involves buying homes off housing developers that the firms were struggling to sell and homes from the private market. The city council aims to buy 40 homes off the private market in the next year.

Mr Fullagar said the authority largely builds homes in ones or twos, in small infill plots. However, it hopes to build up to 70 affordable homes at the Aida Bliss site in Chester Green and has 66 more affordable homes in the design stages across four other schemes.

Derby Homes is about to build its 1,000th home.

Paul Clarke, the city council’s chief planning officer, said it has struggled to get developers to submit schemes which would see them obliged to build affordable homes.

The council currently asks developers behind schemes of 15 homes or more to have 30 per cent affordable housing. However, he says this has led to a flurry of 14-home schemes being submitted instead.

He said that if the requirement was lowered to 10 homes and above requiring 30 per cent affordable homes, developers would instead start submitting nine-home projects.

Mr Clarke said: “We push developers and they say ‘yeah, we can’t afford it,’ and the district valuer agrees exactly what we can squeeze out of them.

“We have an awful lot of land around Derby that are fields, that are not coming forward because the developer and landowners can’t agree on a price.”

He said a fund of money was needed to help make these deals go through, with payments to developers to secure land, which the firms would then pay back, leaving that same money available to help speed up other potential projects.

We need to look at securing private land for new builds. We need to get the land to be able to build what the city really needs. Shaun Bennett