Construction Forum says new Housing Committee is needed
THE Guernsey Construction Forum has written to all States deputies urging them to support plans to establish a dedicated committee on housing.
A requete proposing such a move, laid by Deputy Sasha Kazantseva-Miller, is due to be debated in the States today.
In the letter GCF chairman, John Bampkin, implored deputies ‘to dare to be brave and grasp the issue at hand’.
‘The serious lack of housing needs special attention and a razor-like focus to alleviate the issues that will be felt for generations to come if we do not act now,’ he wrote.
‘We are currently losing generations of young people and other professionals from the island due to lack of affordability on our island. A large amount of this affordability is down simply to supply and demand.’
The requete was first brought to the house in September but a sursis, led by the Policy & Resources committee, pushed back the debate until the Budget had been debated.
Early discussions saw deputies clash over the annual costs involved, with estimates ranging from £310,000 to £500,000.
Mr Bampkin said that the new committee was needed to address the severe lack of progress made towards physically building the houses that the island so desperately needed.
‘We believe that by bringing the powers of the four-plus committees that are able to influence the granting and enabling of housebuilding, under one committee, that this will bring about the urgent action needed to start to reverse the critical position we find ourselves in, after many years of indecisiveness and hesitation.’
The GCF said the last two and a half years’ worth of house building statistics showed clearly that the current system was not working.
‘It would be remiss of any government to let a crisis continue and deepen any further when it had the chance to address this,’ said Mr Bampkin.
‘We need to put the delivery of the Strategic Housing Plan under one umbrella and start building houses now. The only way that will happen is if all of the accountability, responsibility and most of the control for delivering this plan is co-ordinated and centralised under one committee.’
