People in Salford are being priced out of the city’s new high-rise tower blocks, a councillor has claimed.
Bob Clarke, leader of Salford Conservatives, said it was ‘not acceptable’ for new high-density developments to have no affordable homes.
He made the comments during a meeting at Salford Civic Centre on July 16.
“We’re building thousands and thousands of flats and nobody can afford to buy them,” Coun Clarke said.
Salford council’s housing policy requires all developments with high-density apartments to make sure at least 20 per cent of homes are affordable.
It also states that a reduced number of affordable homes can be considered if ‘all practicable options have been exhausted for delivering the minimum affordable housing requirement.’
Coun Clarke sits on Salford council’s panel which decides planning applications, and said he has ‘complained for years’ about high-rise developments being approved without affordable housing.
Salford mayor Paul Dennett said national planning laws are causing schemes to be approved without affordable homes.
“There are different challenges when it comes to building high-rises,” Mr Dennett said.
“We have the perennial challenges of viability, certainly in places like Salford and the north of England.
“There is considerable public money going into schemes to get them on the way, so more needs to be done to ensure that we deliver truly affordable homes in high-rise developments, I absolutely agree on that.
“But at the moment from where it stands, the national planning policy framework includes a clause that allows developers – if they can prove that schemes are not economically viable – to not contribute to our policy requirements, i.e affordable housing.”
Several major regeneration projects are currently taking place across Salford, as the city looks to boost the number of homes available and tackle the housing and homelessness crisis.
But some schemes have been approved by the council in recent years without having any affordable homes.
One application approved in September last year was for a co-living tower on Gorton Street in the city’s Greengate area, which included 568 studio apartments within a 42-storey complex on a disused surface-level car park.
The development was approved without any affordable housing after an assessment was able to demonstrate ‘a lack of viability which precludes the provision of affordable units within the scheme.’
The applicant instead agreed to offer £400,000 towards an overall package of planning obligations, according to a council report.
Another scheme – an 18-storey tower based at the Springfield Business Centre on Springfield Lane – was also given planning permission by Salford council last year despite having no affordable homes in the plans.
During a council meeting to decide the development in April 2024, Salford MP Rebecca Long-Bailey submitted a statement urging the council to reject the application.
Her comments read: “It would be a staggering dereliction of duty to approve a housing development of this size that did not include any affordable homes.”
However, the council did approve the scheme.
It was stated that ‘viability concerns’ were part of the reason for the lack of affordable homes, but the applicants did offer £100,000 towards off-site affordable housing.
