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Housing 2024: Metro mayor promises to retrofit every home in West Yorkshire by 2038
The Labour mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, has pledged to retrofit all 650,000 homes in the county by 2038.
Ms Brabin, who was re-elected in May, made the commitment during a session at the Housing 2024 conference in Manchester on Tuesday.
Pressed on how it was possible to meet the target given the economic pressures facing social landlords, she said: “It is going to be difficult, but we are going to help.
“We’ve run a number of pilots, we’ve had 3,500 homes retrofitted across West Yorkshire. And the cost of not doing it is greater than the cost of doing it.”
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“I really am grateful for the changes Homes England have made in the fact that we can now look at the housing stock that we have already,” she added.
Ms Brabin also reiterated her pledge to deliver 5,000 new affordable homes over the next four years in a mix of tenures.
She said the West Yorkshire Combined Authority was launching a low-interest loan scheme for homeowners in the next few weeks to buy insulation, heat pumps and solar panels.
The metro mayor was scathing about the nation’s homelessness crisis. “The billions wasted on temporary accommodation, thousands of families stuck in low-quality bed and breakfasts or hotels, we all accept is absolutely a waste of money,” Ms Brabin said.
“In West Yorkshire, we have 12,000 homeless households, 85,000 people on the waiting list for housing and over 1,000 in temporary accommodation, 500 of those have children.
“That should shame us all. It also costs us a fortune.”
The latest government data showed that English councils’ spending on temporary accommodation rose by 9% last year to hit £1.7bn.
Ms Brabin said she would ask the next government for more flexibility around funding and support for councils to deliver more social homes.
“I want a single settlement,” she said. “The red tape is too difficult, waiting for government to come back slows us down. We need that flexibility.”
The mayor also revealed that she had asked housing secretary Michael Gove for help building in areas of West Yorkshire with low land values.
“What I was saying to Michael Gove was, surely, if I could basket up projects that are all being done at the same time across the region, then we can draw together the cost of [brownfield land] remediation and offset that against the cost of the housing,” she said.
“We can’t have it that where there are high values and high demand, that’s where you just keep on building. Because as the mayor, my job is to do my own levelling up across West Yorkshire,” Ms Brabin stated.
Earlier in the day, Andy Burnham had called for the next government to transfer train stations to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority so that housing can be built around them.
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