If I wrote a book it would be ‘Life and Times of a Frustrated Planning Chair’

“affordable” meant a combination of tenures and mixed housing such as bungalows and small flats as well as five-bed homes.

And, alongside other council colleagues, he demanded an immediate end to the right-to-buy scheme, which took social housing out of the rental sector.

He said viability studies had evened out the playing field slightly, with one recent scheme netting the council £600,000 in contributions.

But other plans, such as developers reporting “abnormal” elements on their sites, continued to cause headaches.

“You could write a Monty Python script with some of the stuff they come out with. ‘We’ve just started digging and you’ll never guess what we’ve found.’

“They’ve found asbestos, concrete, a big hole. Their digger’s disappeared – it’s fallen down a pit shaft. All sorts of stuff like that.

“Yet the poor little lambs still end up with a 20% profit.

“Affordable homes are only affordable once. It doesn’t matter if they sell 10 times they should always be 20% below comparable prices of those around them. That way it is affordable.

“Right-to-buy should be stopped immediately,” he told the Huddersfield Town Hall meeting. “It should have been stopped years ago. It’s one of the reasons that we’re in the mess that we’re in. There are some poor sods in our society can’t afford them and that’s those on zero-hour contracts.

“I want this strategy to work but we’re only as good as developers make us to deliver these houses. We’re passing them but it’s up to developers to start to work with us. It’s time that developers did try to work with us better.”