This change on housing is welcome

CHELTENHAM Borough Council has approved the plan to borrow £100m to invest in new housing. The Joint Core Strategy agreed in December 2017 defined how much housing was needed and where it should go up to 2031.

But we are keen to make sure the council plays a key role in making it actually happen.

The promise that the council would invest £100m in local housing was a pledge in the Lib Dem manifesto for the 2018 elections.

Agreement to borrow the money is just the start and we need to agree the projects to spend it on and each will be justified with its own business case.

The council’s housing stock is managed by Cheltenham Borough Homes and we have worked very closely with them on this and building more than 100 new homes in recent years.

We now want to work with CBH on doing more.

This will involve scaling up the level of new home building and also building homes both for market rent and shared equity.

One of the big frustrations in trying to provide enough affordable homes over the last few decades has been the Housing Revenue Account.

Anything spent on council owned homes where rents are less than market levels has to go through the HRA which is legally completely separate from Council Tax income.

So the HRA covers building homes, along with improvements and repairs to existing homes.

The frustration has been that central government has capped the amount that can be spent via the HRA thus restricting what local councils can do.

Central government seem to have got that message with the announcement the spending cap on the HRA has been scrapped.

While this won’t solve all problems overnight the combination of scrapping the HRA cap and the council’s plans for investment does for the first time in generations give us a serious chance to tackle housing affordability issues.