Start building council homes

There is no hiding from the facts about the shortage of social housing for local residents. Cllr Howes [Letters, January 7] tries his best to obscure the position, but his wilful refusal to accept responsibility for a lack of housebuilding and buying during his previous tenure as Cabinet member for housing is undeniable.

The argument he tries to run has two strands: firstly that, thanks to the purchase of Parham Road properties, 63 families will have housing who wouldn’t otherwise have had it; and that the cost of properties is irrelevant. Neither of these is true.

This conservative-run Council failed to build ANY council housing for 10 years. It built precisely four flats during

2017/18. Then, under intense criticism from Labour for wasting £150 million on Whitefriars, it panic-bought the Parham Road homes to try to hide its previous failures, seeking cover just ahead of local elections. That panic resulted in paying too much for unsuitable properties - £365,079 for each one - compounded by a failure to properly assess their condition, creating a £1 million pound-plus overspend and a failure to properly manage the refurbishment works, causing months of delay. As a result, a number of those properties remain empty and the number of families provided with a home is well below 63.

None of this is to the credit of either Cllr Howes or the Council. The bottom line is that the most cost-effective way to provide additional council housing is to build it. That’s substantially cheaper than buying existing properties, avoids upgrading costs, and creates the right sort of homes. As the council is sitting on significant areas of unused land, it could avoid the significant costs of buying land to build on.

Cllr Howes makes the unsubstantiated claim that this is “an ambitious council”. If he’d like that to be true, then some imagination and a change of strategy are required. The council must begin a programme of house-building to rectify 14 years of neglect, and stop relying on commercial property

developers to provide so-called “affordable” housing which is not for council tenants and which in any case is not in the least “affordable” for our residents. Less defensiveness of the sort exemplified in Cllr Howes’ letter, and a genuine determination to provide cost-effective housing, would be a good place to start. Cllr Dave Wilson

Labour, Barton ward