Telford & Wrekin Council are building thousands of new homes more than the borough needs it has been revealed. The Council’s senior partners in the new Black Country Consortium are set to use the Borough’s extra homes to meet their own shortfall.
Telford & Wrekin Council’s own Objectively Assessed Housing Need Survey (OAN), for which it paid consultants around £25K, has stated that only 9,940 new homes are needed to meet local demand, but the Labour Controlled Council has ignored its own report and decided to build 15,555 instead. This is a total of 5,615 extra new homes the Borough does not need.
Councillor Andrew Eade said “At last we know what has been going on behind closed doors at the new Black Country Consortium joined by Telford & Wrekin as junior partners and without voting rights. Our Councillors have rolled over under pressure from the regions ‘big boys’ and are now wrecking our town and building on our green fields just to meet a housing shortfall in Birmingham and the Black Country.”
“They are clearly little more than puppets dancing to a Black Country tune. Why should we see our borough wrecked to deal with someone else’s problem?”
“The Council must now have to create 40% more jobs above national forecasts. Clearly this is not sustainable and we may end up with empty houses and high unemployment.”
“The Labour Council’s key principles supposedly include Honesty and Openness so why can’t they practice what they preach and tell us what they are really up to and how our roads, schools and way of life will cope with what they are doing to us.”
Attached: -
a) Extracts from the “Duty to Co-Operate Technical Paper January 2016” which is available on the Council’s Web Site.
b) T&W Conservative Group’s response to the Local Plan which contains details on housing and employment figures quoted in the OAN
c) The OAN (Objectively Assessed Housing Need Survey) is available on the Council’s web site.