Last night at Full Council, the council passed a motion titled Tackling the Temporary Accommodation Crisis which includes calls for government to support Councils to buy land for affordable housing developments based on current use, Local Housing Allowance to be urgently increased and strengthening rights for renters. The full motion can be found here.

Sam had planned to speak but was not called. Here was his speech he planned to give:

Government figures show that 104,510 households in England were in temporary accommodation at the end of March this year, an increase of 10% from the previous year with 953 of those in our borough.

It is a sad state of affairs that so many families are having to live in temporary accommodation. The emails I receive from residents about housing are the most sensitive and upsetting.

One such email I received was from the parent of a young person who could no longer live in their current property because of mental health issues and the only option was temporary accommodation. I wanted to be able to tell the parent that their child will be able to move into a house or flat in the very near future. But this is often not the case as housing waiting lists are very long. I am pleased this motion mentions the work Encompass do in preventing homeless and the support it gives to our residents and Encompass were very helpful in this resident’s case.

So what can we do? Well, we could build more homes and in particular council homes such as Beech Tree Place which will provide 92 new council homes.

We also have the upcoming Elm Grove redevelopment on the horizon. Building all types of houses will help to tackle the housing crisis and hopefully reduce the number of families needing temporary accommodation as private housing can free up council housing and vice versa.

A lot of people say that we need genuine affordable housing. But the way we do that is to build more houses.

This council has led the way in doing that in building new council homes across the borough where some have even won architectural awards. We have policy in our local plan in ensuring developments of 11 units or more or that it has a maximum combined gross floorspace of more than 1000m² must deliver affordable housing. So back the motion tonight and let’s do something about this housing crisis.