Before Christmas, I wrote about the work Ipswich Borough Council and its partners are doing to help people who have been made homeless.

As vital as this work is, it is equally important to try and make sure as few people as possible become homeless in the first place. A large part of this is trying to expand the amount of affordable housing offering long-term tenancies.

Both elements – cost and security of tenure – are important.
The impact of the cost of housing is obvious. Soaring private sector rents and reductions in the support from the Government has made a great deal of rented housing unaffordable to many people on low incomes. Someone who loses their job may find that, even if they are awarded the full amount of housing benefit, they still need to find hundreds of pounds a month towards their rent.

The security of a tenancy is perhaps even more important. The number one cause of people being made homeless in Britain is because their landlord wants to sell their house. Despite repeated promises over the years, the Government has still not legislated to end so-called “no-fault evictions”.
This is why council housing is widely regarded as the gold standard of rented accommodation.

Tenants have security of tenure. They can be evicted for non-payment of rent or breaching tenancy conditions, but they cannot be kicked out on a whim by their landlord. They can regard the home as “theirs” for as long as they want it.

Council house rents are much lower than private sector rents, which helps those tenants who are in work, but they are also kept at a level that will be fully covered by housing benefit if a tenant should be made unemployed.
Sadly, there just aren’t enough council houses available for everyone who wants one. Since Right To Buy was introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s – and more importantly, her insistence that sale receipts couldn’t be used to build replacement houses – the number of council houses has halved in Ipswich.

So, we must press on with our programme of building new council houses to give more opportunities to people on the housing waiting list.
We’ve recently completed 40 new homes in various sites across the town. This includes 16 at Grimwade Street which is probably the most prominent site we have developed so far. I have received lots of positive comments about how good these flats look and was very pleased to hear that they had won a design award from the Ipswich Society.

We’re now pressing on with a further 302 new homes at four sites.
All of them will be built to good environmental standards with excellent insulation and solar panels where possible and will be reserved for people with a local Ipswich connection.

Work is scheduled to start work on-site at Ravenswood for 96 homes this month.

The former Hope Church on Fore Hamlet has been demolished to prepare the way for 30 more homes.
Our largest development to date will be taking place at Bibb Way with the conversion of the old BT offices into 78 flats and the construction of a further new 72 homes on the site.

The final scheme is on Hawke Road where the Council purchased a disused industrial site and has combined this with adjacent amenity land in a plan for 26 new homes and a significantly improved new play area.

For all these schemes, construction is scheduled to be completed and the homes fully occupied by the end of March 2025.

We have successfully applied for grants totalling nearly £3.5m towards the construction of these schemes. This is important as the cost of building new homes has soared over the last couple of years.

We need to keep up the momentum so we are already looking at where else we may be able to build more council houses when these schemes are finished.