By Anna Whittaker, Local Democracy Reporter
Concerns have been raised families in Newark will struggle to pay a rent increase for tenants in council houses.
Rent is due rise by more than £150 a year as part of plans by Newark and Sherwood District Council to generate more money for building new council homes and improving existing ones.
The plans to increase the rent by 4.1 per cent for 2022/23, which will come into force from April 2022, were passed at the authority’s Full Council meeting on February 8.
The Conservative-led authority said the rise will amount to £3.18 per week on average for tenants.
The council said it is committed to providing ‘new, high quality social housing’ within the district as well as making improvements to homes.
Councillor Paul Peacock, Leader of the Labour Group, spoke against the plans during the meeting and said families, single parents and pensioners have raised concerns with him about paying their bills this year.
He said: “They are feeling the squeeze like never before. As we all know our tenants are facing an increase in energy costs, increased council tax, increased fuel costs and increased costs in basic food items.
“At the same time their incomes are not keeping up pace with inflation.
“On first consideration, I was fully behind these changes and in normal times we should always look for improvements to all our services.
“However, in my conversations with tenants over the last few days they told me they felt now was not a good time to increase rents in order to improve services.
“Their view is that they already have fantastic improvements on housing services.
“They told me that the cost of living crisis is such that they have real concerns about the coming year and an extra £165 to pay will make things much tougher.
“I’m arguing that we should be doing what we can to cut household bills for hard-working families, but this absolutely does not mean that we cannot build new social housing.”
He proposed a 1.15 per cent increase instead, which was turned down by councillors.
Councillor Laurence Gough (Lab) said: “We don’t need a £165 increase by local people struggling in hardship. People are struggling with food, gas, electric and so forth.
“I will not be supporting the increase.”
Councillor Timothy Wendels (Con) added: “We face a number of challenges over the next few years. There’s a need to invest in our housing stock and we need more council houses.
“I remind councillor Peacock that the proposed improvements have been put together with tenant representatives after consideration of over 3,000 pieces of feedback.
“It is the tenants that would suffer if we do not proceed with these service improvements.”
He added: “I am pleased that discretionary housing payments will be used to help tenants on housing benefit or Universal Credit who need additional help meeting their housing costs. That is 64 per cent of our tenants.”
Leader of the Council David Lloyd (Con) said: “It’s a difficult decision, we are uncomfortable doing it, but we understand the imperative to do that for those self-same tenants, their children, those that follow, better housing for their parents and others.
“This is something we must do. Reluctantly, but we must.”
A total of 24 councillors voted in favour of the plans for the 4.1 per cent rise and eight voted against.
