Kenilworth just one step on housing ladder

While there are concerns about costs – the purchase price for the land leaves us with a plot cost in the region of £50,000 each – it looks like a sensible decision. It will help. But it will take time, plenty of time. And the chances are that the overall impact on the housing market will end up being negligible.

In these pages this week, Deputy Peter Roffey opined that we need about 1,000 new homes, which in his view should be split between social rental, partial ownership, and key worker accommodation, over the next 5-10 years. Building these homes tomorrow would remove the GHA’s waiting list and provide another 500 homes for it.

But the GHA cannot be the only answer to the housing problem. It has obvious limitations – who qualifies, the size of the waiting list, how partial owners of GHA properties move off that ladder and in to full home ownership.

One suspects that no-one would be keen to see the States go into the development of homes for private sale, as it last did some 30 years ago with the development of Clos des Pecqueries. Those ‘first-time buyer’ homes soon lost their discount on the market and would still be available today for something north of £400,000, which probably counts for affordable in today’s market.

Will there be, within a relatively short time frame, progress on Leale’s Yard, which, together with the Kenilworth site, herald the opportunity for the regeneration of the Bridge area?

And/or given enthusiasm for brown field developments and ‘living above the shop’ – Deputy Jonathan Le Tocq’s contention that 5,000 extra people could be housed in Town ‘without blinking an eyelid’ has not been dismissed by islanders – maybe planning regulations or some kind of incentive needs to be launched to encourage this.

Four football pitches-worth of homes, coming a year or more down the track, won’t alone solve our current or future housing problems.