Sale of homes to foreigners is ‘scandalous’
LIB DEM LEADER SLAMS MARKETING OF CITY FLATS
LIBERAL Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable has pitched into Manchester’s affordable housing debate - calling the direct marketing of city centre apartments to foreign buyers ‘scandalous.’
In the city to support Lib Dem candidates in the upcoming local elections - including the town hall’s only current non-Labour councillor John Leech - Sir Vince also called on the council to create mixed communities in the city centre, rather than focusing more ‘affordable’ housing elsewhere.
His comments come amid a growing debate about the city’s housing market, including about how the city centre is developing.
He told the M.E.N. Manchester was suffering similar problems found in other cities, adding that homes are ‘massively overpriced in relation to ordinary incomes.’
“It’s not as extreme as in London, Oxford, Cambridge, but it’s pretty bad and as a result of that the council has got to focus on the particular problem about how you get more affordable housing,” he said.
The Lib Dem leader was particularly scathing of developers who market their new homes to overseas investors, rather than local buyers - an issue previously highlighted by the M.E.N.
Some of those developments have included apartment blocks underwritten by Greater Manchester Combined Authority loans, a fact that has drawn criticism from housing campaigners.
“Quite a lot of these luxury flats are not going to local young professionals - they’re going to people overseas, they’re being marketed overseas, the kind of thing you get in central London,” said Sir Vince.
“And that’s absolutely scandalous. There are ways you can stop that. You can advertise first here, rather than overseas, you can have higher levels of council tax for properties that are left empty. And those are the kinds of strategies that should be devised.”
Conceding that part of the difficulty in building affordable homes comes from the government’s restrictions on council borrowing, making authorities unable to easily build social housing, he said the town hall’s own policies also need to change.
“They are getting some affordable housing, but it’s segregated and the worst possible way to develop housing in a big city is to segregate the relatively affluent and the less affluent parts of the population,” he said.
“So you then get gated communities, you’re perpetuating negative cycles of deprivation in relatively poor communities and there are lots of good models everywhere of ‘pepper potting,’ where you get a proper mix of communities - and that’s what John (Leech) is fighting for here.”
The Lib Dems are hoping to chip away at Labour’s stranglehold on the council in May by upping their tally of councillors in the all-out elections.