North Yorkshire Council showed unity in backing a surcharge on second home council taxation - Andy Brown

So, it was particularly pleasing to see a touch of harmony break out on North Yorkshire Council recently over the important issue of second homes and the availability of some housing that local residents could actually afford to buy.

At the moment the average house price across North Yorkshire is nine times the average household income. That makes it hard enough for a young person to work their way into a position where they can make a bid to buy a home. All too often people who have saved for years are finding that they are outbid by someone who can easily afford to buy it as a second property.

Virtually every councillor who represents residents in popular tourist destinations like Whitby or the Yorkshire Dales knew friends, neighbours or constituents who were born locally or had decades of local connections but could not afford to buy or rent locally. Both the rental and the purchase markets have been hit hard by second homes.

Instead of arguing over who had the best policies to deal with this problem almost the entire council came together to back the introduction of a surcharge on second home council taxation and insisted that this money would not be used to bolster challenging council finances but to provide additional council housing or housing association properties that would meet identified local needs. The plan is also to make these homes cheap to run by being very energy efficient which of course also helps with climate change.

It is only legal to introduce this tax from April 1, 2025 and it will take time to plan and build needed housing so I was particularly pleased that when I put forward an amendment suggesting we should get started on plans for this building programme straight away that was also readily agreed across party.

There are, of course, plenty of areas where North Yorkshire Councillors disagree on housing. There was much debate over what is the right way to ensure that developers of large estates also provide a high proportion of affordable homes amongst their commercial developments.

There are developers who take the requirement to create significant numbers of affordable homes seriously and have built a fair share of good quality properties that have really helped the local community at the same time as making reasonable profits on their developments.

Many of these good developers also realise that building to very high standards of energy efficiency actually helps with their profitability as the homes are so much cheaper to run that people are prepared to pay a little more to buy a house because the increased mortgage is easily exceeded by the cheaper running costs.

Other developers seem to do everything they can to dodge the commitment to build affordable homes sustainably and employ highly paid accountants to provide complicated numerical analyses showing that they will lose money if they make the contributions to the community which are normally required.

It is therefore of critical importance that the new North Yorkshire Council starts life with a strong headline policy about the proportion of affordable houses that will be required and makes sure any challenges to the viability of doing that are the result of specific local circumstances.

The building industry is known to go through extreme economic cycles and building sites differ in their difficulty with some being very wet or steep. It is therefore entirely possible that during the 20 year life of a Council Housing plan there may be exceptional circumstances which prevent a developer from building as much affordable housing as policy would normally require.

Some of us thought that it was critical that the new council set a headline target of at least 30 per cent affordable homes and then adjusted it if there was firm auditable evidence that this number was unachievable on a particular site at a particular time because of specific difficulties.

Others told us that the new council had to be realistic about current circumstances in the building industry and they set a lower number in the emerging local plan for Selby.

It isn’t always easy to debate issues like this in a spirit of mutual respect when differing views are held with passion and conviction.

Fortunately, it is sometimes still possible in local politics for people to recognise that everyone who sits on a local council cares about the welfare of their community and is seeking to champion its needs in different ways.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.