Conservative-dominated Wealden District Council is making a mess of housing and letting down young people, people on low incomes and small households across the whole of Wealden.
Wealden Green Party says that our District Council needs to wake up and make sure that we have the housing we need, at a price people really can afford.
Green Councillors can achieve truly affordable housing
In Brighton & Hove, Greens on the City Council pushed for social rents to be pegged to local incomes – not to local housing market rates. And they won, so households with an income of £20,000 can now afford social housing in the city. That’s the difference Green Councillors can make.
What housing do we need in Wealden?
We need more 1- to 3-bedroom houses and flats to be built, because that’s the size of most modern households. We need more social housing. And people on low and average incomes need to be able to afford to live in Wealden.
What has our District Council done? It has given permission for masses of 4- and 5-bedroom houses that most people can’t afford. Even worse, it has overseen the building of way too few of the 2- and 3-bedroom homes that people are asking for.
Wealden District Council is also happy to let properties at the government’s laughable definition of ‘affordable’: 80% of a ridiculously high market rate is still ridiculously high and out of reach for most people.
Why is this? Why do our Councillors so singularly fail to make sure people in Wealden have somewhere to live? Could it be that the biggest profits lie in building large houses, and our Council is a pushover for greedy developers?
Could it be that Wealden’s housing policy is a mess of contradictions and figures that just don’t add up?
It doesn’t have to be like this.
Wealden District Council gives in to housing developers’ greed
Wealden District Council believes that the market will deliver the homes we need, despite all the evidence showing that the market responds to a few developers’ profit margins, not to what people need.
Why do we have so many large houses and so few smaller homes? Easy: large homes turn a pretty profit for developers; small homes make them less money.
In the early planning stages, the developers show Wealden’s planners a good proportion of smaller homes. They get permission to go ahead and build. But the developers don’t actually want to build those smaller, less profitable homes.
What do they do? It’s simple. They tell Wealden District Council that they can no longer make a profit with the mix of housing on the plans. They can only build homes if they cut the smaller ones – and Wealden District Council has housing targets to meet, so it agrees, time after time, so that at least some houses get built. They’re massive houses that few people can afford, but hey, the target was met. It’s bye-bye affordable homes yet again.
Wealden’s haphazard housing strategy
Only the brave read Wealden District Council’s draft Local Plan last year. But if you waded through it, you realised that it was a tangle of confusion and conflicting figures: the Council doesn’t know what it’s doing when it comes to housing.
How much new affordable and social housing does Wealden District Council think it needs?
The government’s target for new housing in Wealden is 14228 homes over 15 years, so Wealden needs to build 950 homes a year to meet this.
How many of these new homes need to be affordable? Wealden doesn’t seem to know. Its own Affordable Housing Delivery Plan(2016) stated that Wealden needed 812 affordable homes per year.
(‘Affordable’ here means social rented housing, lower-cost home ownership schemes, and the government’s extremely unrealistic definition of affordable as 80% of market rent.)
Those 812 ‘affordable’ homes would be a high proportion of Wealden’s target of 950 new homes a year. Handy, then, that three months later, consultants appointed by the Council published a Strategic Housing Market Assessment. It assessed that Wealden needed just 331 affordable dwellings a year.
That’s a pretty huge discrepancy, but unsurprisingly Wealden decided to go with the lower figure in the draft Local Plan, not even mentioning the higher figure.
With this, Wealden District Council has abandoned many – if not the majority - of people it has assessed as being in housing need. They will be unable to afford market rents or to buy in Wealden, because of the Council’s preference for giving profits to private housing developers over working with housing associations – or building homes itself.
Wealden’s unaffordable ‘affordable’ rents
In 2012 the coalition government introduced "self financing", mandating that local authorities became wholly responsible for their social housing costs. This responsibility came at a high cost for Wealden: the Department for Communities and Local Government determined that the District 'owed' the government just under £48 million. Wealden District Council therefore borrowed that amount, and promptly paid it into the government's coffers.
A positive outcome of the law change was a renewed local impetus to build more social housing. Wealden District Council developed plans to build more than 60 new council houses on three sites across the district. Unfortunately, despite the new financial freedom, Wealden decided that it needed a £1.4 million government grant in order to progress their plans. Wealden's social housing tenants are paying the price of that grant because it came with a very thick string attached: any social housing constructed using the grant must be let at an 'affordable' rent.
Affordable rents are a lot less affordable than they might seem. 'Affordable' rents were introduced by the coalition government and are set at 80% of market rent. Here in the South East that's still very expensive, and considerably more than social rents at about 50% of market rent. Increasingly, the Council is undermining its position as a social housing provider by letting to new tenants at the higher ‘affordable’ level, rather than at the older social rent level.
Wealden’s new social housing: squeeze it in
Following completion of the 64 new council-built houses in 2014, progress has stalled. Less than half that number have been constructed in the five years since. And far too many of them are being squeezed into areas that already have a disproportionately large concentration of housing and not enough infrastructure.
Jarvis Brook is one of the most severe examples. In 2014, 22 new dwellings were built at the end of a congested cul-de-sac, and another 40 are now being built on a former refuse depot site. Between them, these new builds bring the total number of dwellings served by a single access road to 500. But Wealden have repeatedly refused to take any notice of calls to ensure that transport provision on the estate is improved to cope with the increased traffic.
Greens believe homes are for people, not for profit
Wealden Green Party challenges Wealden District Council to do better. We want our Council to:
- Ensure that 1- to 3-bedroom homes are prioritised in planning developments.
- Fully enforce planning policy so that developers cannot slide out of commitments to build 1- to 3- bedroom and affordable homes on their developments.
- Explain – if it can – how its assessment of housing need plummeted from 812 to 331 homes per year in just three months.
- Build the social housing that people need – either itself, or with housing association partners.
- Charge social rents, not ‘affordable’ rents to low income households.
- Plan properly for public transport and other infrastructure, so that new developments do not crush local resources.
- Investigate the effect of the Habitats Regulation on any housing expansion: how will Wealden District Council reduce the pollution effects of housing growth on the Ashdown Forest? This is a legally binding regulation that Wealden doesn’t seem to be addressing in its housing plans.
