Issue - meetings

A motion was proposed by Councillor England and seconded by Councillor Uttley. An amendment to the motion was proposed by Councillor Williams and seconded by Councillor Griffiths which was accepted by Councillor England. Therefore, the substantive motion proposed (as amended) was as follows:

1.  This Council notes that there are 7859 applications on the Dacorum Housing Register, either waiting for a transfer to housing appropriate for their needs or waiting for the opportunity to be housed by the Council or other registered social housing providers.

2.  Since 2013, this Council has committed to building new homes for social rent, 300 being provided by the Council itself, working with Housing Associations and others to supplement that figure.

3.  While welcoming the progress made, the Council notes that we will be given a target by MHCLG to provide opportunities in the new Local Plan for the building of over 16,000 homes in Dacorum over the next 18 years.

4.  This Council further notes that at current market rates, few of those proposed homes will be affordable by those on the Council’s Housing Register, even if a full discount is applied, given the proposed local plan suggests that genuinely affordable’ means substantially more than a 20% discount.

5.  Therefore this Council commits to build on the positive work of previous years and continue work directly to develop homes for social rent and to seek further opportunities with partner registered providers to accelerate the delivery of new social rent homes.

6.  The Council requests that as work progresses on the development of the draft local plan the task and finish group should look at the targets and definitions of affordable housing with a view to planning a greater proportion of social rent homes, which should be quantified as at least a range of feasible targets.

A vote was held:

43 for,

0 against,

0 abstentions,

Therefore the motion was carried.

Councillor England proposed the motion constructively and having discussed it with Councillor Williams he welcomed a measure of consensus alongside the sometimes different creativity of their wider debates. This council can make clear its commitment to existing Borough residents and voters who are on the housing register or will need to be during the next 18 years. This 16,000 homes or a rationalised locally justified version of that number, if we get that far, is a one off opportunity to build social homes and bring on Dacorum progress through balance and stability of having proper housing for people. This number is large and he doesn’t think this opportunity will come again. He was particularly uncomfortable with the local planning consultation being a bit blank on this quantifiable as a component of the overall number, and was as impatient as everyone to see a significant step up in gearing local housing towards reducing overcrowding. He knew that there was some similar feelings on the Conservative side as well, and accepted the difficulty that members will have with making an ambitious commitment such as is actually in the motion without first seeing the financial plan.  That was the reason for point 6 which was to create a financial plan so that when we complete our local plan we’re talking about something deliverable. Obviously there was the possibility of an amendment which may deal with that in a different way.

He said the town of Hemel in particular has a great history in social housing for people and we should all be proud of that. He commended the officer’s work which has gone into this strategy and he brought this motion as a constructive contribution because he felt it was important to have a quantifiable goal of producing more social housing at an expanded level from what we’re doing at the moment.

After working through the consultation information to try and help signpost various residents and encourage them to follow through and make a comment it became apparent that the evidence of progress to the crucial goal of supporting health, wellbeing and cohesion of the community, which he saw as the most important goal of all, is that must depend on being able to say by what extent the overcrowding and mismatched housing circumstances of thousands of current residents, how that would be sought. A lot of homes are going to be built and what he was saying was if we go through this and don’t build enough social housing, we would have created an unsolvable problem for ourselves. There is a need to define what we mean by affordable and he was gratified that this aspect of the consultation was likely to receive some study as a product of perhaps an amendment. The South West Herts local housing needs assessment say that Dacorum needs 363 affordable homes by a technical definition. It also says on page 7 that 87% of these will only be affordable if they’re at social rent, properly affordable  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5