Plans for new Preston council house tenants to move in ‘by start of 2027’

The first council house tenants in Preston for more than two decades could be moving into their new homes by the start of next year, the city’s leader has said.

It comes after Preston City Council was given the green light to start providing social housing for its residents once again.

Matthew Brown, who leads the Labour-run authority, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) he hoped the first of 18 properties the town hall is poised to purchase for that purpose will be ready to roll out the welcome mats by the beginning of 2027.

He also revealed that the council aims to deliver a total of between 40 and 50 dwellings within the next two years – all of which will be for social rent.

That means they will be made available at up to 50 percent less than the local market rate, based on a government formula that makes them cheaper than properties in the ‘affordable homes’ category – which are offered at around 80 percent of usual rents.

The city council announced in February that it had made an offer to buy 19 yet-to-be-built dwellings, which has since been accepted – although the number of homes has now been reduced to 18 after what the authority described as a “correction” by the developer.   Councillors will be asked to approve the deal at a meeting later this month.

No details have been given about the exact location of the dwellings, although as the LDRS previously revealed, they are expected to be to the north of the city, where extensive housebuilding is taking place.

The Regulator of Social Housing has now approved an application from the city council for so-called ‘registered provider’ status, which will allow the authority to fulfil what Cllr Brown describes as a “long-held ambition” to bring council housing back to Preston.

He added: “Not having it is causing huge issues in terms of opportunity and addressing poverty in communities.

“If you go back to when I was born in the ‘70s, a lot of my extended family lived in council housing – and it was very easy to get a council house.  That’s all been taken away and, because of that, I think there are lots of problems [related to] inequalities and, in terms of [social] mobility, it’s a real issue.

“We need new social-rented properties – and the best way of [achieving] that is the council getting back involved in providing them.”

The city authority transferred its previous stock of council homes to the not-for-profit landlord Community Gateway Association (CGA) in 2005.   That followed a vote by tenants at the time and came after the introduction by the government of a ‘decent homes standard’.

Local authorities were obliged to consider whether the new quality threshold could better be met by handing over their housing to a third party.  Those properties – which, combined with others since built by CGA, total almost 7,000 – remain available at a discounted rent.

Figures show that over 1,700 affordable homes have been delivered in Preston in the last five years – more than any other part of Lancashire.   They include those secured as part of the planning process, where local policy insists at least 30 percent of dwellings on new developments must be classed as affordable – rising to 35 percent in rural areas – unless a housebuilder can prove it would not be financially viable for them to meet that requirement.

However, according to government statistics, only 70 new dwellings have been created over the same period in the cheapest social rent category.

The Liberal Democrat main opposition group on the city council said during the authority’s budget-setting meeting in March that the £5m Labour had set aside for its council housing programme over the next two years was “poor value for money”.

The party’s finance spokesperson, Cllr Neil Darby, added that the 18 homes planned would “do nothing at all” to deal with demand for social and affordable housing in Preston, where there are “queues in the hundreds for every single Select Move property that becomes available”.   Select Move is the system that matches dwellings to households in need of them.

However, Cllr Brown told the LDRS that the £5m would also finance “another scheme” – when coupled with other potential funding sources – before Preston City Council is scheduled to be abolished in April 2028.

“We hope to get to 40 or 50 properties at least,” he said, adding that the first tranche of 18 – which will become available in phases through to spring 2028 – were being secured at “a discount”.

The authority plans to bring in an existing registered provider to take day-to-day management responsibility for the new homes, as it does not have the in-house capacity to do so itself – but the authority will set the standard for the properties.

Pressed on the plausibility of council housing ever becoming available in Preston in the volumes it once was, Cllr Brown said he believed there was “a real appetite” within Labour at a national level to “get back to having first-class council housing for people” – which was shared by the party locally.

“There’s going to be a debate in the Labour Party…about direction in the next few months. I think trying to return to some kind of level of council house building we had up until the 1980s is going to be [part of that],” he explained.

In Preston City Council’s preferred scenario for the future shape of local government in Lancashire – following a shake-up ordered by ministers which is now under way – Preston would merge with the Lancaster and Ribble Valley council areas.

Lancaster City Council retained its council house stock following the introduction of the decent homes standard in 2004, because its properties already met the necessary criteria.  The authority owns and manages almost 3,600 dwellings, a capacity and experience that would give whatever replacement authority ultimately covers the Lancaster district a base from which to expand council housing across its wider patch, should it choose to do so.