MORE than 1,350 affordable homes could be built in Northumberland over the next five years as part of a new strategy aimed at tackling a serious shortage of accommodation for local people and young families.
The planned programme involves a combination of building hundreds of new council houses, and providing support to housing associations to help deliver almost 1,000 more.
County Hall bosses plan to use their borrowing powers – and transfer council-owned land valued at up to £20m for housing development – in a bid to make significant progress on what has been identified as a key priority by local people.
The move comes at a time when there are 13,700 applicants on the county’s Homefinder social housing register – of which 7,500 have been assessed as having housing need.
The new strategy proposes building more than 450 council houses over the next five years, and council support to enable housing associations to provide about 900 more. It adds up to 1,356 new units, but this will not be a net increase as some of them will replace outdated existing stock, such as on the Hodgson’s Road estate in Blyth.
The council has already secured £2.8m from the Homes and Communities Agency to help build 176 affordable homes by 2015, and hopes to use resources from its own housing revenue account to provide another 280.
A housing working group has supported the proposed strategy, the funding of which is being considered during the current deliberations on the 2012-13 budget.
