At last week’s full council meeting I was able to announce the wonderful news that the Labour Government has awarded Crawley Borough Council just under four million pounds towards unlocking brownfield sites to build new homes.
I understand that Crawley received the third largest amount awarded in the country.
We will use this funding to clear empty buildings to make way for the homes. This category of land is expensive to prepare for housebuilding, meaning sites are sat empty and do not enhance the visual appearance of the area for local communities.
In Crawley, this will assist in the delivery of about 270 new homes across three sites, where at least 150 of these (well over half) are destined to be affordable homes, that proportion could be much higher by the end of the process and a very significant number of them will be council homes for residents on our local waiting list.
The first milestone is to ensure that we are in contract for the demolition works by March 2025.
From the outset, Labour promised to get this country building again to deliver 1.5 million homes over this parliament and help tackle the housing crisis we have inherited. That is the essence of fixing the foundations and driving growth.
By helping us with these costs, that frees up the council’s money to spend on additional council housing and temporary accommodation to help keep a roof over many local families’ heads.
To achieve the ambition to build more homes, the government has also announced an overhaul of the planning system, and introduced ‘brownfield passports’ to ensure where planning proposals meet design and quality standards, the default answer to planning permission is yes.
They have also set up an independent New Towns Taskforce, as part of a long-term vision to create largescale communities of at least 10,000 new homes each. In this way, we avoid some of the pressure of urban extension on existing towns by building them elsewhere, an issue that has been very relevant to Crawley’s boundaries over the years.
Cllr Michael Jones
Leader, Crawley Borough Council