Council now looking to buy houses as well as build them

This will see greater emphasis on buying property and using powers to bring empty properties back onto the housing market.

At a meeting of Powys’ Economy, Residents and Communities scrutiny committee on Monday, December 12 members looked at the authority’s performance report for the second quarter of the 2022/23 financial year, up to the end of September.

The report still follows the targets of the former administration’s Vision 2025 corporate plan – as work to shape the new cabinet’s “stronger, greener, fairer,” corporate plan takes place.

This new plan is expected to replace Vision 2025 by April 1, 2023.

Councillor Jeremy Brignell-Thorp said: “We’ve got a target of constructing 250 new homes by the end of 2025 which seems a rather modest number as we know the number of people on the waiting list is about 5,000.

“Is the 250-target appropriate and will it solve the waiting list problem?”

Deputy council leader and portfolio holder for housing, Councillor Matthew Dorrance told the committee that 61 new council houses had been completed, seven had been bought from developers with another 56 in the pipeline now that planning permission had been secured

Cllr Dorrance added that there were a number of issues to “grapple with” such as cost-of-living crisis adding costs on building projects and phosphate issues causing planning delays in parts of Radnorshire and Brecknockshire.

Cllr Dorrance said: “We will be modifying the future (corporate) plan and the focus will not just be on building new homes but on acquisition and bringing empties back into use.

“So, we have a take a three-pronged attack to what is a housing crisis in Powys.”

Committee chairman, Councillor Angela Davies said that people were having problems contacting the council’s planning department and experienced delays with applications.

Cllr Davies said: “When we look at objectives for recruiting or retaining staff – how are we going to manage those planning delays that are in our control.”

Cllr Dorrance said: “It’s no secret that the planning service has experienced the harsh brutality of austerity.

“If we want to speed up planning, that takes resources.”

Head of planning, Gwilym Davies said that the staff turnover in the department had been 70 per cent in recent years.

Work was now taking place to “grow our own” planning officers, by training staff up to degree level.

Mr Davies said: “We’re seeing good progress, but the loss of staff has had a big impact on us.”

He added that talks with planning agents to get better quality planning applications submitted to the council would also quicken the process.

This would mean that planning officers would need to spend less time in talks with applicants.

“That will also hopefully drive down the determination time frames,” said Mr Davies.

The report will go on to be discussed by the cabinet.