By Press Release
A political squabble has broken out over housing numbers after the IW Council’s Conservative councillor group released a new ‘plan’ for housing, calling for the Alliance-led administration to use a housing company they set up in 2019 to deliver new affordable homes to rent to homeless Islanders.
Despite the council voting to borrow £40 million in February last year, just five homes were built last year.
Tory leader Cllr Joe Robertson said: “After nearly two years of promising to deliver affordable homes, the council’s own housing company remains dormant with a single director, no staff and no business plan. If the Alliance cannot produce a viable business plan, then it should come clean and say so.”
However, the claims were quickly contested by Labour Cllr. Richard Quigley who said it was the Tories’ own budget amendment that had prevented new housing being built because they had moved £500,000 out of the company to plant trees, meaning it would have made a loss in the first year if it traded; something the government would not permit. He said: “Far from having a plan, the Tories have guaranteed that no development will take place. They have put politics before the people of the Island, yet again.”
The war of words escalated when deputy leader of the council, Cllr Ian Stephens weighed in, saying that the company registered in 2019 was left dormant by the Tories with only a single council employee as a director and is “not robust enough” to handle public funds to build housing. He accused the Tories of trying to make political capital over the issue, adding: “In 2021, we inherited a disorganised housing service split over four departments in areas where a cohesive and effective service was ‘difficult’, all of which had been ignored over the four years of the previous Conservative administration.”
Figures released by the politically neutral House of Commons Library show that over the previous 11 years a total only 665 rental homes had been built, an average of just 60 a year. The list of people on the council’s housing register, that is people already living on the Island with an Island connection, currently stands at over 2,500.
A spokesman from the Isle of Wight Council said that the council had set a legal budget for the year 2022/23 and that the Conservative budget amendment had reduced the likelihood that the council would have been able to borrow money to deliver affordable housing schemes, but would not have prevented it.