Enfield council calls on government to subsidise its housebuilding plans

The Labour leader of Enfield council has called on Boris Johnson’s government to back the local authority’s housebuilding ambitions with public cash as it launched a major consultation around its housing plans.

Nesil Caliskan, one of the UK’s youngest council leaders, said in addition to working with housing associations and developers she wanted to deliver 3,500 genuinely affordable council homes over the next 10 years.

Everyone had a right to live in “well-connected, safe neighbourhoods where no-one will be left behind”, Caliskan said, but that in order to provide them her council would need “significant subsidy”.

She said the government needed to step in “to help us build and supply homes on the scale required. But we are not going to sit back and wait.

“As well as lobbying government, we are seeking [the public’s] views to inform a strategy that will provide the groundwork for affordable, health promoting, accessible, and environmentally sustainable homes that are digitally connected across Enfield, for all of Enfield.”

The council said its definition of affordable housing worked on the principle that residents on low and median incomes should not have to spend more than a third of their household income on housing rent or purchase costs.

Enfield is in the process of searching for developers to build hundreds of new homes for the local authority as part of the next phase of its £6bn Meridian Water regeneration scheme.

In April Enfield named Galliford Try as its partner in delivering more than 700 homes on the Meridian development.

Caliskan said the consultation would help the council map out a decade-long housing and growth strategy for the borough as well as how to address homelessness and rough sleeping.

She wanted residents, stakeholders and community groups to take part in the consultation, which closes on 21 October 2019.