Council house plans in Wolverhampton set to develop further
Moves to build the first new council homes in Wolverhampton for 30 years have taken a step forward after they were earmarked for approval.
The properties in Thompson Avenue, Ettingshall, will be the first to be built in the city since a development was created in Pendeford in the 1980s.
The city council will give the seven-acre site to developers Kier for free and in return wants a quarter of the 104 homes which are being built.
Papers published ahead of a planning committee at the city council next Tuesday have now revealed councillors will be recommended to give officers at the authority delegated powers to grant permission for the scheme.
If the homes are approved as expected, Councillor Peter Bilston, the authority's regeneration chief, has revealed building work would start within months.
Councillor Bilson said not only was he keen 'to get the project' started before Kier's original pledge to begin work next year, but also that the authority was looking for other potential sites for social housing in the future.
The plans for Thompson Avenue reveal that the houses will feature high efficiency gas condensing boilers and also systems that will reduce the amount of water used each day.
They are grouped in short terraces with a few semi-detached and detached units in between.
Some will have small courtyards and private drives accessed from side roads.
The waiting list for the council's housing company Wolverhampton Homes currently stands at around 13,000.
There are also more than 3,000 council tenants affected by the Government's so-called 'bedroom tax', which removes 14 or 25 per cent of housing benefit for people who have one or more spare rooms.
However, the council has a shortage of smaller homes for people to relocate.
The leader of Wolverhampton City Council, Councillor Roger Lawrence, has previously welcomed the development of the new council homes saying the authority recognised there was a 'significant need' for housing in the area.
It emerged in June that a review of council-owned land throughout Wolverhampton had been carried out in an attempt to try and find sites for hundreds of new homes in the city.
The first potential development sites are set to go before council bosses later this year.
