Call for thousands of extra council homes (From The Argus)

Call for thousands of extra council homes

9:39am Wednesday 3rd December 2008 in News By Andy Tate

Thousands of families waiting for a council house in Sussex should be helped by encouraging local authorities to buy and rent out unsold properties.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg told The Argus he was calling for a change in the law to bring relief to the “soaring” number of households languishing on waiting lists during the recession.

According to figures published by the Department for Communities and Local Government, almost 40,000 households in the county were waiting for council homes last year.

They include more than 10,600 in Brighton and Hove, more than 12,400 in East Sussex and more than 16,400 in West Sussex. Mr Clegg said: “You have seen a haemorrhaging of the number of social homes in this country, with a radical increase in the number of people who need social homes.”

The Liberal Democrats calculated that changing the rules to give local councils the financial freedom to borrow against their assets would enable them to take advantage of falling property prices and expand their council house stock by about 10% over a 30-year period. This could yield an additional 3,719 social homes across the county – including 1,240 in Brighton and Hove, 1,025 in East Sussex and 1,454 in West Sussex.

Mr Clegg, pressing the Government to introduce legislation for the measure in today’s Queen’s Speech, said: “We should lift restrictions on councils from borrowing against their own assets so they can provide services that local people want, but more specifically buy up the large amount of unsold property that is now building up in the British property market and use it as social housing.

“There was a social housing crisis even before the recession – 1.7 million were on the waiting list. That is now soaring and we have a million fewer social homes now than we did in the housing recession of 1992-93.

“The Government has put a little bit of money into building extra social housing but it is on a minuscule scale compared to what is now necessary.”

Mr Clegg also called for legislation to make permanent and binding recent guidance to mortgage lenders to give families who are failing to meet their payments at least three months’ grace before starting the repossession process – and to double the breathing space to six months.

Des Turner, MP for Brighton Kemptown, said: “Allowing councils to borrow and buy homes could be useful.

It is not going to have a very large impact but it is a start.”

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