Dorset Council should build their own council/social housing

Social/council housing for Bridport

The Bridport Area Neighbourhood Plan’s Housing Need Assessment 2019 identified the number and type of housing needed to meet the needs of local people, particularly Bridport’s young people and families.  However, the prevailing national and local models of housing provision have consistently failed to meet the needs of local people in Bridport. 

Over five years ago Dorset and Bridport Town councils declared a climate emergency.  BTC has ensured this to be an overarching consideration in every policy decision and action taken thereafter.  The current housing-land-supply methodology has been shown (eg by the CPRE) to be flawed and to represent an inappropriate level of urban growth for rural areas at a time when environmental and food security concerns strongly argue for extra protections. Proposals for the new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) threaten an even greater uplift to the housing-land supply methodology which will almost double our already unmanageable house-building targets.  This will result in the effective negation of local democracy in planning; and an exponential increase in private, free-market development resulting in the loss of swathes of green-belt, farm, and National Landscape land; forced urbanisation; and huge population growth of people largely of retirement age.  This will gridlock our roads and increase the burden on our infrastructure, when our sewers, electricity capacity, health and social care services are already under unbearable strain.

Yet still the requirements of our own housing-needs assessment will not be met and DC’s constituents, local young people and families in particular, and the keyworkers we desperately need to recruit to keep our services and economy running, will not be able to afford the housing on offer. 

It is thus clear that continuing to follow the same policy will result in the same outcomes and the same failures. 

If DC are serious about resolving our local housing crisis, we must start doing things differently.  Now is the perfect time for DC to grasp the nettle and turn things around by resisting the previous apathetic ploughing of resources into trying to accommodate impossible national policies that work against the needs of our area.  Our new Local Plan should reflect our new, progressive, council and MP by being bold, ambitious, innovative, intelligent, imaginative and genuinely strategic. DC needs to actively seek radical solutions that thwart government policy hindrances by creating and implementing different models of social housing provision designed to genuinely meet our needs.

In 2019 the government lifted the borrowing caps that restricted investment by most councils in building new council housing.  This was promised to herald ‘a new generation of council homes’ in England.  That, coupled with grant funding from Homes England, new not-for-profit and public/private partnerships, partnerships with other, compatible authorities, etc, have led to many local authorities across the country implementing a variety of innovative programmes that are successfully delivering council and social housing.

We therefore task our new Dorset Council to undertake a scoping exercise to undertake research into ways in which we can deliver social housing for our young people and families.  We recognise that there are constraints, but many councils are managing to overcome these — and there are also many opportunities.  With a serious intention and commitment, Dorset Council can learn from and become one of the trailblazers.

There are a number of considerations and questions we would like to put to Dorset Council:

• Dorset Council should set up a development corporation to build social housing, and/or explore partnering with Somerset Council's existing Development Corporation to share resources and expertise.

• Dorset Council should buy the J C Phillips site in Bridport (apparently sale to Churchill’s has not yet been agreed, see below).  We ask DC to find out how much the land is on the market for and get ballpark figure for cost of developing site.  An adaptation of the Churchill plans for 50 double bed apartments plus 25 cottages, but for younger people, with scaled-down numbers to include their greater car parking needs.  Even a scaled-down plan might be too big an operation for a CLT so might require a DC development corporation/joint exercise, for instance, in partnership with Somerset's and/or a big housing association like Magna.

• DC needs to respond robustly to the new NPPF consultation proposals and to team up with other south west councils to get an exception to any 'uplift' in the housing-land-supply methodology, to insist that the metrocentric approach be rejected in favour of new more appropriate, bespoke, plans that meet our real requirements and take into consideration the climate emergency, protection of our landscape and food security from unnecessary urban sprawl and the replacement of our rural culture and heritage with conurbations.

• As a matter of urgency DC needs to establish an active and proper working partnership with Magna Housing Association whereby you work together to find immediate, short- and long-term actions for our social housing provision.  In addition, DC should set up a south-west forum for housing associations to meet together and to help to explain to national government the special circumstances of the south west.

• Our new Local Plan should including figures for DC’s housing strategy: eg in Bridport 400 new houses over the next 5 years 60% of which social rent (eg, DC sells 40% of houses at market rates to subsidise the building of the 60% social homes)

• DC needs to undertake an audit of empty private property and consider compulsory purchase orders in order to rent them out for social housing.  DC also needs to consider a private sector landlord registration scheme like in Waltham forest?

Bridport is becoming demographically unbalanced. The Dorset Planning CPRE has highlighted how Dorset’s median age and proportion of over 65s is one of the highest in England, fuelled by inward migration. There is an acute shortage of social housing and private rentals and over 4000 on the Dorset Council Housing Needs Register. The requirements of our own housing-needs assessment will not be met if we continue using the same developer-dependent models for housing supply and Dorset Council’s constituents, local young people and families in particular, and the keyworkers we desperately need to recruit to keep our services and economy running, will not be able to afford the housing on offer.