Borough council is among worst in country for providing affordable homes

11:00am Friday 19th March 2010

By Laura Kitching

THE borough council ranks among the worst in the country for delivering enough affordable homes to meet local need, a housing charity has found.

Shelter’s Housing League table, which is launched today, shows that Weymouth and Portland Borough Council is delivering seven per cent of the affordable homes that are needed.

It is ranked 284 out of 323 English local authorities for affordable housing delivery – 30 places behind West Dorset District Council, which in 254th place is meeting nine per cent of local needs. Purbeck District Council is ranked 197 and is meeting 15 per cent of the affordable homes that are needed.

Local authorities are responsible for identifying the housing need in their area and for ensuring enough affordable homes are provided to meet this need.

However, Shelter’s research has found that 76 councils, including Weymouth and Portland, are delivering 10 per cent or less of the number of homes they have identified are needed.

Shelter’s chief executive Campbell Robb said: “These figures are extremely worrying.

“With more than 3,345 households on the housing waiting list in Weymouth and Portland, the council must work far harder to ensure more desperately needed affordable homes are provided if it ever hopes to meet the housing needs of the local population.

“Independent experts commissioned by the council say 800 new affordable homes need to be built each year in Weymouth and Portland, but an average of only 57 have been delivered in the past year, leaving a shortfall of 743 homes per year.”

The findings are part of Shelter’s Housing League Table, a new one-stop-shop website that provides local housing data including house prices, housing waiting lists and levels of housing delivery.

The website also ranks councils according to their current levels of affordable housing delivery against their analysis of housing need.

Mr Robb added: “The recession has created a difficult climate for house building, but these figures clearly show that Weymouth and Portland Borough Council is struggling to provide enough affordable homes for those who need them.”

A spokesman for Weymouth and Portland Borough Council said: “It is unrealistic to expect the delivery of affordable housing to keep pace with the identified need.

“It is a small, constrained borough and opportunities for large scale development of affordable housing are limited. In fact only a small number of applications we receive each year reach the threshold to generate any social housing.”

l To view the rankings online visit the website shelter.org.uk/housingleaguetabledata