Letter: Mr Lyon Still Has Questions to Answer on Provision of Social Housing

Published on: 25 May, 2019
Updated on: 25 May, 2019

Julian Lyon

From Philip Brooker

former Conservative borough councillor for Merrow and former lead councillor for housing and development management

In response to: Dragon Interview: Julian Lyon, Senior Policy Adviser to R4GV

I applaud Mr Lyon in his aspiration to provide more social housing in Guildford. He identifies the town centre as the most likely location and also adds that the town centre could sustain approx 3,500 additional dwellings – as indeed the previous conservative administration had already identified.

He also points out that he would not countenance “ghettos” of social housing. This all begs the question of where he is going to find the various sites and funding for this social housing, on which he had no answers. We shall watch with interest how this aspiration develops – I suspect there will be very little, if any, improvement over the previous Conservative administration’s plans.

We should also carefully monitor the Liberal Democrats election manifesto promise to provide 3,000 additional council houses over the next 10 years – again, an aspiration doomed to failure.