Aim to provide 1,000 homes delayed by over six months
CARDIFF council is set to miss its target of providing 1,000 new council homes by May 2022.
It has pushed this target back to December 2022, with the council blaming the delays on the coronavirus pandemic.
On February 1 there were 7,555 people on the council house waiting list.
A council spokesperson said: “The council has an ambitious house-building plan and has targeted the delivery of more than 2,000 new council homes to meet high demand for good quality, affordable housing in the city.
“The new homes will be delivered in a number of ways, including via our flagship development programme, Cardiff Living, with national developer Wates Residential, the council’s own additional build programme, package deals and buy backs from the open market.
“While we are making good progress towards our targets, there is no doubt that the pandemic has had an impact on the development programme, partly due to issues with the supply of materials, and the need to accommodate on-site safer working arrangements but also due to our increased focus on delivering specific homelessness recovery projects at speed, in the light of the COVID-19 crisis.
“These factors have not stopped our schemes but there has been a delayed handover of our new homes.”
The council aims to deliver 2,000 council houses as part of this overall program.
There have been 396 new council houses provided so far, and it is expected that over 500 will be completed by March 2021.
The delay in providing the first 1,000 homes was raised at a community and adult services scrutiny committee on Monday, February 22.
The chair of the committee, councillor Shaun Jenkins, noted that the target for the homes to be delivered had been changed.
Councillor Lynda Thorne, cabinet member for housing and communities, confirmed that there was a delay.
“That’s not down to us not wanting to deliver or problems within our delivery, it’s problems with the developers and managing sites during lockdown and through Covid.
“I think it is better for us to be up front and honest but we will still do our best to deliver as many as we can by May.
“If we had just had the one lockdown that we had at the beginning of last year, maybe it would have been ok but we have just had another few months of lockdown and we are not sure when that’s going to end either,” Coun Thorne said at the committee meeting.
However, councillor Adrian Robson, leader of the Conservative group at Cardiff council, said that the council needs to “knuckle down now and get on with it”.
“My colleague councillor Jenkins was absolutely right to ask the question about the delay and unfortunately it seems that securing sites because of the pandemic and other issues because of the pandemic has delayed it.
“But I hope we don’t get to a situation like we did in the 2012-2017 Labour administration here in Cardiff where they promised to build council houses and secure housing and they didn’t achieve any at all in the five-year period,” Coun Robson said.
