Talks over site six affordable homes

The future of the dwellings intended for rent or shared ownership depends on the outcome of the detailed discussions.

Arun District Council has stipulated that 436 '“ or one in three '“ of the 1,350 dwellings set to be built on site six should be for social occupation.

The council has made the three developers set aside the land needed for the homes for free.

But they have to be built with money provided by registered social landlords, usually housing associations.

They don't have enough cash to afford the quantity of homes which it is hoped will help to solve the chronic shortage of social housing in the Bognor Regis area.

Council leader Cllr Gill Brown told councillors: "The council is in the middle of very difficult negotiations because the finances available are insufficient to build anywhere near that number."

Intense talks are taking place to remove the gap between the price which the developers want for the housing and the amount the landlords can afford.

Building work on site six should start this year. The social housing does not have to be built. But nothing else can take its place. The chosen plots will, therefore, stay vacant while the owner-occupied homes are built around them. This could hamper efforts to sell the housing on the open market.

Bognor has suffered from a shortage of publically rented accommodation being built in the past ten years.

This has caused a large build up on the housing waiting list. Family-sized homes are in particularly short supply.

Almost 6,000 affordable homes need to be built across the district in the next four years to help to meet the growing demand.

The council has 3,876 households waiting for a home but currently only lets some 300 a year.

This means families, in particular, can spend four to six years often in poor accommodation waiting for a suitable property.

The situation in a town with a low wage and low skill economy has been worsened by the steep rises in privately owned property prices in the past decade.

As the Observer reported, average houses prices in the PO21 and PO22 postcode areas are about ten times average earnings.

Social housing is bought by the registered social landlords with money from the national Housing Corporation. They have to bid for the cash against other schemes.

This restricts the amount available and it is only handed out if the housing meets strict criteria.These include quality of the build, specific room sizes, the number of sockets in a room, location of scheme and mix of properties.

Only landlords on Arun's approved list can be chosen by developers.