Issue - meetings

The administration set a manifesto commitment to deliver Council Housing in addition to the social housing currently being delivered through established enabling activities.  A programme to directly deliver around 50 units of accommodation over the next 1-2 years, including both supported housing and shared-ownership housing, is currently in progress. 

A decision is now required on the milestone to extend this programme to deliver a further tranche of up to 58 affordable Council Houses by utilising eight sites identified in this report.  These homes would all be social rented homes.

On a motion from Councillor Tom Davies, seconded by Councillor Richard Samuel, it was unanimously

RESOLVED (unanimously) that the Cabinet agreed to:

The administration set a manifesto commitment to deliver Council Housing in addition to the social housing currently being delivered through established enabling activities.  A programme to directly deliver around 50 units of accommodation over the next 1-2 years, including both supported housing and shared-ownership housing, is currently in progress. 

A decision is now required on the milestone to extend this programme to deliver a further tranche of up to 58 affordable Council Houses by utilising eight sites identified in this report.  These homes would all be social rented homes. 

Councillor Tom Davies introduced the report and made the following statement:

“In 2019 we all made a commitment to the residents of Bath & North East Somerset - a commitment that we as a LibDem administration would build the first general needs Council Houses in our area for a generation. 

Tonight, we as a Cabinet are here to deliver on this commitment as we approve the first phase of this new Council House building programme and I am delighted to be here proposing this paper.

And as we sit here tonight considering this item, never has the need for new Council Houses been so great. As an area with some of the least affordable housing in the country, thousands of our local residents are currently on our social housing waiting list, hundreds of them in the categories of highest need. 

As the paper in front of us shows - the Council has and will continue to play a key role in enabling new social and affordable housing to be built and delivered in our area by developers including our local housing association partners. With the Council playing this enabling role, nearly 2,000 affordable homes have been delivered in our area over the last ten years. Furthermore the Council is already working to deliver a programme of around 50 units of accommodation including supported housing and shared-ownership housing.

But the scale of the need means that it is vital that the Council now plays a new role and takes on a new responsibility - a role in which it utilises some of its own assets and becomes responsible for directly delivering and owning new general needs Council Houses for social rent for our residents. This is what we are here tonight as a Cabinet to approve.

And people listening tonight should be under no illusion as to the scale of this LibDem administration’s ambition for the role the Council can play in this area.

Tonight we consider the first 58 general needs homes across eight sites, but over the coming months we will be developing plans for the delivery of hundreds of additional Council Houses in our area over the coming years. 

Under the Liberal Democrats, this Council will become a leading provider of social housing in our area - housing of which we are proud - housing of high quality and which, in its design, construction and on-going maintenance, meets our obligations under the ecological and climate emergency declarations which we have made. 

And I would also like to stress that whilst we have been advised that due to aspects of commercial confidentiality we have had to keep the specific details of the sites being considered out of the public papers for tonight’s Cabinet, any Councillor who wishes to see the list of proposed sites, need only contact the Head of Housing and he will happily arrange to meet with them to share this information. Furthermore, I would stress that any site development will of course be subject to the full  ...  view the full minutes text for item 78