South Holland District Council leader Gary Porter's joy at scrapping of housing borrowing cap

Many of you will have seen in the Prime Minister’s Conference speech a couple of weeks ago the announcement that the housing revenue account (HRA) borrowing cap will be scrapped.

In layman’s terms this means that local authorities, including South Holland District Council, will now have more freedom to borrow in order to develop new affordable housing in their area.

This is a vital step in ensuring that safe, secure, affordable homes are available to everyone in the country, not just those who are already living in them.

Those who have kept an eye on my political life, both in South Holland and nationally, will be well aware that this move to scrap HRA’s has been a particular area of focus and passion for me for quite some time.

Achieving this ambition has been a realisation of many years of campaigning and is an exciting development with countless potential to do good.

It has not been a solo crusade though, and councils and individuals of all political colours and beliefs deserve a huge amount of credit for coming together to help take steps towards fixing the housing crisis with this change.

In the 1970s local authorities were the major providers of homes, responsible for more than 40 per cent of new builds.

In 2017, this figure was below two per cent nationally and that is something we need to kick-start drastically, and it is great that we are being given the chance to do so again.

At South Holland District Council we already have Welland Homes, who are working with local building companies, property developers and other organisations to acquire, develop and build new homes in the district.

They are doing some great work with small developments in the district including Pankhurst Close in Spalding, and I hope we can now continue and accelerate this move to build good quality and affordable new homes and infrastructure that everyone in our community can benefit from.

I truly believe that we are talking about weeks and months, rather than years, before the positive impact of this change begins to be felt.

It is a change which will not only benefit tenants and new buyers, but also put millions of pounds into local communities and building companies, whilst still saving the tax payers money on benefit payments every year.

As I have already alluded to, the possibilities are endless. This is the single biggest change we have seen in social housing in almost four decades. We must seize this opportunity and ensure that everybody on the housing ladder feels real, tangible benefit from it, and take a crucial step forward in solving this country’s housing crisis.