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Rising rents driving child poverty in West Yorkshire, says metro mayor
Tracy Brabin has said that “greedy, avaricious” private landlords increasing rents is driving families into poverty in the region, in an interview with Inside Housing.
The Labour mayor of West Yorkshire, who was elected in 2021, said: “People are becoming homeless because landlords are putting rents up in order to be in line with market prices, when actually they don’t need it because they’re in a fixed mortgage themselves.
“It just avaricious, and it’s greedy. And I would say to landlords that do that, you’re not really welcome in West Yorkshire because it’s not fair. Particularly when the cost of living is squeezing people’s incomes.”
Ms Brabin, whose combined authority covers Bradford, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Halifax and Leeds, added: “A third of all children in West Yorkshire are living in poverty. 200,000 families are using food banks. This is fuelled not just by the cost of living but also rising rents.”
Earlier this year several Labour metro mayors including Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, Steve Rotheram, mayor of Liverpool City Region, and Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, called for an immediate rent freeze to help renters deal with the cost of living crisis.
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But Lisa Nandy, then shadow housing secretary, slapped down the calls in June, saying: “Rent controls that cut rents for some will almost certainly leave others homeless.”
Ms Brabin stopped short of joining her fellow mayors in directly calling for rent control powers. She said: “I’ve not thought about rent controls currently, it’s not in the forefront of my mind.” A spokesperson for Ms Brabin later said that building affordable homes was more important to the mayor.
Ms Brabin spoke to Inside Housing as she visited the Holtdale estate, where last year 190 homes were retrofitted with heat pumps, solar panels and insulation by Leeds City Council and Equans at a cost of £9.6m.
“[There are] 680,000 social homes across West Yorkshire and we have to retrofit them all,” she said. “So while this programme is really fantastic, and the outcomes are really spectacular, we’ve got to turbocharge that delivery.”
West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) has set up a Better Homes Hub for people who own their own property to get advice and support. The mayor said she was also “working with partners, whether that’s Kirklees or Bradford or Leeds, to build a head of steam where people understand that this is a benefit for you. It’s disruptive in the first instance, but it’s a benefit.”
In May, WYCA signed a partnership agreement with Homes England, which has identified 16 regeneration projects in the region. “I’m so proud of that,” she said.
Initially it was unclear whether this partnership would come with extra funding, but Ms Brabin’s team told Inside Housing that Homes England would be providing some revenue to the combined authority – although it did not confirm how much.
Primarily, though, Ms Brabin said “it is about a strategic partnership, about place, and supporting us in our thinking in our planning and strategic view of what needs to happen”.
“They’re working very closely with Bradford Council currently on their city centre, where they’re building new homes. In the next two or three years, Bradford city centre will look completely different.”
The mayor campaigned on a target to build 5,000 affordable homes, a pledge she said comes from her own experience growing up in social housing.
“I know that I’d not have achieved the amazing career I had as an actor and a writer and gone on to be able to flourish without that secure start in life,” she said.
“And we know how vulnerable renters are currently and how impossible it is to get on the housing ladder. Buying homes is almost impossible for young people.”
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