Agenda item

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 by that. So, for this to be affordable for Dacorum’s residents and generation over the next 18 years then it’s necessary for us to address this.

 

The front page of Dacorum Digest in December celebrated 300 council homes being built since 2013 and the press release for this achievement pledges 350 more in the next 5 years, but if we build 70 a year as we are currently planning, the deficit of social housing in our area will increase not decrease so we need to say how much better Dacorum expects to do. Working with registered social housing providers is part of this but we can also build for ourselves. We could borrow £1-2million to get started and then as soon as the programme generates its own return to the HRA, we can reinvest and accelerate the programme from there on. He believed that over the course of the plan we can get to a significantly higher figure than where we are now. These are 60 year plans, so he hoped the commitment was to expand on delivering socially rented housing built by Dacorum for Dacorum residents. Obviously the details of how we produce this step up will need to be discussed and put in place.

 

Hemel, where 10,000 new homes are planned is known for being an early new town, a place where social housing was combined with the full range of owner occupied developers with Jellicoe’s Gardens and all the neighbourhoods that we know about. The new town context has become a lasting heritage which is now different in context from 1947, now the urgent housing need for which we must prioritise growth, is the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Jellicoe’s people. Moreover, he argued that if we are bound to develop numbers that even when reduced from the demands manifested at this instance, that we know are ranging high, and therefore we can only do this one. We must take this opportunity to take the old new town forward as a mixed but coherent community where social housing including attractive units to encourage freeing up family homes has not been forgotten in the headline numbers for the absence of quantifiables for housing for everyday citizens of Dacorum. Obviously this needs to be practical with a financial plan, so he was open to commuting the call for a target of 25% in the first ten years. Let’s remember we are investing in the people of this Borough and their health; mental and physical health and wellbeing as a result of being appropriately housed and better able to add value back into the local, regional, national and international economy.

 

Councillor Pringle firstly took the opportunity to thank the officers who had worked on developing the local plan and also thanked her colleagues for spending a tremendous amount of time drilling down on the plan. She then thanked Councillor England for proposing such a well thought-out motion which not only resonates with the residents of Hemel Hempstead but also the residents of Northchurch and Berkhamsted because although many of our residents appear to be blissfully unaware of the current consultation on the local plan, and almost all of those who have engaged with me have come up with the same question; why on earth are we not planning our house building strategically to reflect what our existing communities already desperately need which is decent quality affordable social housing in Northchurch? Not only for the people that live here but for the next generations and people need to be able to be proud to live in social housing and see it as a perfectly reasonable place to live in. As focus is on our key workers who we recognise at this difficult time are so essential to all aspects of our existence, they need decent quality social housing. Instead what we’re being offered is developer led development which she described as ribbon development joining the likes of Dudswell to the village of Northchurch, and the village of Northchurch to the town of Berkhamsted to the larger town of Hemel Hempstead.

 

There’s a desperate plight of local families and councillors will know of the cases where there’s a desperate need of housing for people with young families in completely inadequate and in some cases unsafe accommodation and how difficult it is to get anywhere local of them to live. Those people are in a desperate fight and there’s nobody who wouldn’t want them to have a decent home, a socially build house for their family. It seems that the plight of these people and homeless people on our streets is being used a reason to build on places such as the fields around the village of Northchurch, so we will have what is locally known as the Wishing Tree field in Northchurch is going to be developed upon. That is going to desecrate the view from Northchurch Common and Ashridge as you can currently get an uninterrupted countryside view across the valley and that’s going to be spoiled forever. What we need instead is to have something more sensible where we actually listen to what local people want. She urged all colleagues present tonight to support the motion.

 

Councillor Williams said he had the opportunity to discuss this with Councillor England and was hugely sympathetic to the underlying sentiments of the motion which is that we should seek to deliver proportionate to the local plan. He didn’t think it was a discussion on the local plan but focuses more on the social housing aspects of that and to seek to deliver a higher proportion of social rented accommodation as a proportion of what’s being delivered, bearing in mind that in order to deliver higher level of social accommodation or any other rented accommodation that assumption is that you’re delivering more and more housing across the piece and that as we know is in itself challenging. He proposed an amendment to the motion, which 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.

 

He said his amendment wasn’t to disagree with the sentiments of Councillor England’s motion but to seek to bring it into a more appropriate mechanism. He felt it was more appropriate to go back to the process from bottom up and to refer discussion about the nature of the affordability of housing through the local plan task and finish process.

 

Many members will know that the 300 houses we aimed to build from 2012 onwards that Councillor England mentioned earlier was at a time when the borrowing cap was on our HRA and we were very limited on the funding that we could raise to accelerate that programme. since that borrowing cap has been lifted we have been able to be more ambitious in terms of numbers of new houses that we can build and unlike many councils and nearly all housing associations we are almost uniquely building for social rent development because we recognised the need to deliver housing which is truly affordable to our residents. He was sure that officers would be happy to confirm that he had argued with them that the policy of 80% of market rent was not truly affordable and therefore we’ve stayed away from delivering at that level. Delivering social housing for rent is subsidy dependent because social rent does not cover the cost of developing and building new properties. We’re fortunate as an authority that we have quite a large stock and we’re spreading the costs of that across the base of that large stock. If we were developing standalone accommodation for social rent it simply wouldn’t stack up without a massive amount of subsidy and part of the reason for referring this back to the local plan task and finish group is to look at how the various options around affordable rent properties and how they proportionately plan out in requests to developers. We have a huge number of infrastructure requirements on new developments and we need to balance which aspects of those requirements we want to prioritise. We need to recognise that if we have more socially rented properties it will reduce the pot of money available for other things.

 

He hoped members would recognise the sentiments of his amendment and do not suggest that we shouldn’t be looking more ambitiously at social rent properties as that had been his aspiration for this council for a while but to do this is a way which takes into account all the constraints and challenges that we all face in doing that.

 

The Mayor asked if Councillor Williams had a seconder for his amendment.

 

Councillor Griffiths seconded the amendment. She said she fully supported the original intention of the motion from Councillor England but also fully supported what Councillor Williams had explained earlier that we cannot bring policy to full council without having gone through all the ramifications of what that would mean to the council otherwise it would probably fall over at the first hurdle.  She was delighted to support this amendment which she felt didn’t detract from the original motion but in fact enhanced it and made sure it will be implemented into our plan. She felt it was important to note that as a council and certainly from her perspective was to build as many council houses as we possibly can for social rent which has been the policy from the very beginning of our house building in 2012 and that will continue. We will grab any opportunity we can to build more houses than the next target of 350 if we can get the funding to do so but it does have to be balanced with all the other demands on the HRA.

 

She felt concerned by Councillor Pringles earlier comment of residents being in unsafe accommodation. She urged Councillor Pringle to contact her or the appropriate officers with more details as nobody should be living in an unsafe home. She added that she fully supported the motion.

 

The Mayor asked Councillor England if he was prepared to accept the amendment by Councillor Williams and therefore go forward as the substantive motion.

 

Councillor England confirmed he was prepared to accept the amendment and appreciated it.

 

The Mayor advised that the amendment proposed by Councillor Williams was now the substantive motion and would be voted on in due course.

 

Councillor Birnie didn’t think anyone would dissent with the underlying sentiments behind the original motion and the substantive moment but there were certain aspects of what Councillor England said that had concerned him. He said we’ve all had problems or our children have had problems with obtaining suitable housing when they get to that stage in life. He explained he used to be Chairman of the Hemel Hempstead cricket club and it was a perennial problem there, to the extent that we continually lost the best cricketers as they got to the marrying stage because they couldn’t afford to buy or rent properties in Hemel.

 

He said Councillor England’s suggestion of borrowing £1million frightened him because we’re not a bank and neither are we property developers. It particularly frightened him in light of experience of other councils such as Croydon Council which had set up its own development company and as a result of that ended up with a debt of £1.5 billion and have to have admit their bankruptcy. He hoped we had a lot of consideration ahead of us on this matter as to how we implement it and we must continue with our customary conservative prudence when it comes to financing any such programme in the future. He supported the amended motion.

 

Councillor Symington welcomed the motion from Councillor England and for the support it received from Councillor Williams. She said she would particularly like some clarity around the language used, whether it be affordable or social housing, and believed over time there has been a lot of blurring and consequently misconceptions about what these terms mean.

 

In terms of how the motion was worded she had some concerns with it in so far as it was now worded that it will go through the task and finish group and that’s balanced against the fact that both Councillor Williams and Councillor Griffiths have repeatedly said to all members at council meetings that they cannot bring policy to full council without due scrutiny and what they’ve actually done by amending the original motion was remove the scrutiny that Councillor England had suggested. The formal scrutiny body that is provided by the council is the finance and resources overview and scrutiny committee and that has been taken out and replaced by the task and finish group which she said was a great group, she had been part of it earlier this year and it did work, but it does not have the same statutory scrutiny role that the overview and scrutiny committee would have.

 

She also felt we should be looking as a Council to be helping to fund council houses ourselves but wasn’t sure on the mechanism for that. She said central government wasn’t a bank and there were ways of funding these things so we should be looking at that in more detail. She was fully supportive of the motion but felt it was a shame it had been changed from the original motion in terms of its scrutiny.

 

Councillor Tindall said he had listened to what Councillor Symington was saying and realised that there may be a bit of a misunderstanding about the actual wording of the motion. He clarified that there was no intention to avoid scrutiny, from his understanding the reason for using the task and finish group was that it’s already set up and it’s part of the local planning process and so it was focused on housing. It is a cross party forum which is informal so therefore can discuss things without having party points being made and can actually get to the nitty gritty of what they’re talking about. He envisaged the task and finish group being an early stage of looking at what is possible and that would then be converted by officers into some form of paper which would be presented to overview and scrutiny committees, cabinet etc. so in actual fact the task and finish group is at the very early ideas stage and is not intended by any means to avoid the scrutiny process which would follow.

 

Councillor Uttley agreed with Councillor Williams that this motion was not about the Local Plan exactly, rather about our need for more social housing, and how our build programme to date, whilst positive relative to many other councils, is not keeping up with the need. Whilst the local plan is not the subject of this motion, we cannot deny the connection with it, and felt it would be useful for some members if we talk a little bit about this affordability point.

 

As part of the plan there is a measure of affordability which is used by the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government that is used in the calculation of how many homes a Borough is supposed to build. This measure of affordability that is used in this calculation is 4 times the average earnings in the Borough.  That is, if the average cost of a home is 4 times the average salary then this would be considered affordable, and there would be no increase in the number of dwellings that we are expected to build above the ONS projections.  Here, in Dacorum, the latest affordability measure is around 12, that is houses are three times the price of what would be considered affordable. The measure of affordability that is suggested by our local plan is ‘substantially less’ than 20% below market value.  This is obviously a little vague, but if we consider that substantially less than 20% below market value is 35% below market value, and apply this reduction to our average house price, then our house price that was 12 times average salary is now almost 8 times average salary.  These numbers are just indicative, but even this calculation would make our housing twice what the MHCLG considers affordable. The MHCLG, are trying to apply simple supply and demand economics to the housing market, and the housing market is, sadly, just not that simple.  Building social housing is one of the sure ways in which we can actually make sure we are building homes for the people of Dacorum who need them, rather than building ‘executive housing’ for London commuters.  We will always be in the commuter belt of course, but that doesn’t mean that expensive detached homes should be prioritised over the needed social housing.

 

She had spoken before about the difference between the Office for National Statistics Projected household increases and how these tally, or rather do not tally, with the number of homes we have been asked to build per year by central government. Just to be clear, as because she did not think that this can be repeated too many times, the latest ONS projections for household increases in Dacorum, if we take an average over the next ten years, is 355. That is, Dacorum is expected to increase in population by 355 households per year. These are of course, only projections, however, our local plan provides for 922 homes per year. 922 homes per year over the next 18 years.  

 

The latest information from government states that this number handed down from on high is not a ‘target’ rather a starting point for determining the level of need, and it is only after consideration of this, along with constraints (such as green belt) that a decision on how many homes should be planned for is made. Given this, I think that we are all hoping that a lower number than 1023 can be agreed with the inspectorate.  But how many of these homes should actually be affordable according to the local housing needs assessment. Of the number of houses we are planning for in our local plan (currently 922) we are only at present aiming to build less than 10% of these as social housing per year.  How many social rented properties do we actually need to build per year?  According to the local housing needs assessment for SW Herts, Dacorum needs 316 new social rented properties per year over the plan period.  If we build 70 per year as we are currently planning, the deficit of social housing in our area will increase, not decrease. 

 

Finally, whilst she understood Councillor Birnie’s concerns about borrowing, she pointed out that Croydon Council was not borrowing simply to build social housing, but also a hotel and shopping centre, which was not being suggested here today.

 

Councillor England thanked Councillor Williams and Councillor Griffiths for their support and broad agreement on a constructive direction to answering this question for the local plan. He hoped everyone would support and maximise this opportunity. As Councillor Tindall and the Mayor said earlier, the task and finish group is a creative stage and would be converted into a paper, starting and finishing a good process. He was very happy with that. He felt the key thing that the amended motion achieved, which we owe to our residents, was a sense of an ambition and a quantified number, or at least a quantified range of feasible targets, so that we can deliver a good plan. At the moment we have deliverables for a number required by the planning inspector but we really need to think hard, as I know members do, about the size of the housing register and about the fact that we’ve got people at all stages of their lives who are in unsuitable housing and an essentially we can’t solve that problem without quite significantly increased the amount of social housing that is available of different types.  

 

Councillor Pringle made the point that developers are leading the opportunities and he felt keen for us all to see social housing as something which should be spread throughout the Borough. Residents want social housing and clearly there are thousands of people who are saying that they’re not suitable housed at the moment so he was really glad that this motion has given the opportunity to expand and accelerate the move towards that and he was glad they were able to do it together. He thanked everyone for a good discussion and debate and said he looked forward to the task and finish being an opportunity to pull this apart and come up with some good solutions which we will see down the line.

 

A vote was held:

 

43 for,

0 against,

0 abstentions,

 

Therefore the motion was carried.