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Agenda item
Motion (Rule 14)
Councillor Batsford to propose:
This Council, on behalf of the residents of Hastings, agrees to declare a housing emergency.
With rents soaring out of control, thousands of families are left buried in debt and under the threat of losing their home. Many remain stuck on the Council housing list, with little or no chance of an affordable secure home. The problem is made worse by a huge increase in the use of section 21 notices to secure ‘no fault evictions’ of tenants, destroying family homes as landlords take advantage of unprecedented price rises and sell up.
The Hastings Local Housing Allowance (which determines the maximum level of Housing Benefit that can be paid) now is at least 40% below the market value of most rented properties, once again driving families into debt, with rent arrears blocking them from seeking another home when they’re evicted. The government has just announced that LHA rates are to be frozen for another year, while the rents tenants have to pay continue to escalate with no controls on the level of rents landlords can charge.
The shortage of genuinely affordable rented homes is causing a long-term problem too. But significant numbers of empty homes and identified housing sites, particularly brownfield sites, remaining undeveloped, ‘land banked’ by property speculators who prefer to wait for local housing values to increase still further. Councils can do little about this, as they lack the cost-neutral CPO powers to bring empty homes and land-banked land back into use for genuinely affordable, social rented housing.
Like many tourist towns, residential homes in Hastings are also being stripped out of the rental market through the increase in homes being used as holiday lets, and being bought for second homes. We recognise that holiday cottages for short-term lets are an important part of the local tourist economy. However, second homes remain empty for most of the year, and are of little local value, as well as depriving local people of a potential home to live in. Councils need powers to control the proliferation of holiday homes, and to discourage people from using properties as second homes.
All these factors have led to a huge escalation in homelessness, with hundreds of millions of pounds wasted each year across the country providing unsatisfactory temporary accommodation, when it should be spent on building affordable homes and paying realistic levels of housing benefit.
All these factors combine to precipitate a real housing crisis. We are only at the very start of this perfect storm which will condemn current and future generations of Hastings residents to insecure, unaffordable and substandard housing. A safe, secure and affordable home is a basic human right.
In recognition of the above, this Council:
1. calls on the Leader of Hastings Council, and encourages the Conservative opposition leader to join her, to write to the Hastings and Rye MP and the Secretary of State for the Department for Levelling Up, Communities and Housing, Michael Gove, demanding that he:
• abolish section 21 notices;
• reverse the decision to freeze LHA and increase it so it reflects the true level of private sector rents'.
• allows councils to charge up to 300% Council tax on second homes;
• introduces a separate planning use class for holiday let properties, so the council can control the proliferation of holiday homes though the development control process;
• reinstates the fair rent review system to cap housing rents at a realistic level;
• grants councils ‘cost neutral’ compulsory purchase powers that allow them to deduct costs from compensation paid for the compulsory purchase of long-term empty homes and land-banked land;
• fully funds councils to initiate a social rented house-building programme to finally produce the number of ‘council’ homes our town desperately needs.
2. Ask the Leader of the Council to write to Marie Lorimer, the UK Public Policy Manager at AirBnb to request a meeting, and seek to introduce a 90-day annual limit for entire home rentals in Hastings within the AirBnb platform. AirBnb currently has a lock on their platform that does not allow Greater London entire home properties to be rented out for more than 90 days a year.
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