Liverpool to build new council homes for 21st century

As the city which built the first council houses in Europe 150 years ago, Liverpool has been given the green light to construct a new generation of local authority homes fit for the 21st century.

The government is allowing the local authority to build properties for the first time in more than 30 years, after confirming that it will not need the council to repay the housing debt of £735 million that was written off when the city council transferred the last of its stock to housing associations in the late 2000s.

Housing Minister Kit Malthouse wrote to Mayor Joe Anderson to say that he is ‘pleased to see the ambition and enthusiasm of a city such as Liverpool, in engaging with the urgent process of delivering the new homes that this country needs’.

The announcement marks a return to house building for the local authority, which in 1869 embarked on constructing the first council housing in Europe to tackle issues with sanitation and poor health. The council is now working up further plans for an initial phase of houses, which will contribute to the city’s need to develop 30,000 new homes by 2030.

Anderson said: “Liverpool pioneered public sector housing and my formative years were spent growing up in a council tenement, so I am extremely proud that, 150 years on from the city leading the way on social properties, we are now able to do so again.

“Buying is not for everyone, so it is important that we do what we can to help people in every situation to get the home they deserve, and we need to rebalance the city’s housing market with a wider choice of the homes that people need. That is why I have pledged that we will build 10,000 houses, and I want a proportion of them to be council homes for people to rent.

“Affordable, social, properties are desperately needed to make sure nobody is left behind and that is why housing is an integral part of our Inclusive Growth Plan. I am really excited that we will be able to build new houses for the first time in more than three decades – in my view they can’t be built fast enough.”

John Healey, Shadow Secretary for Housing, said: “Liverpool is at the sharp end of the housing crisis. Everyone knows someone who can’t get the home they need, or aspire to. I’m glad to see a city like Liverpool able to build much needed new council houses – made possible by the lifting of the HRA borrowing cap which we have long wanted to see.”