50 signatures reached
To: Sheffield City Council
Sheffield Axe the Housing Act Campaign
We call on Sheffield Council to send out information to its tenants about the devastating implications of the Housing & Planning Act, to hold public meetings to discuss the Act, to publicly state their opposition to the Act and to stand with tenants, leaseholders, trade unions, community groups and other local authorities to make this Act unworkable.
Why is this important?
The Housing & Planning Act will not solve the housing crisis but make it much worse. It will break up families & communities if council tenants are issued with short term, insecure tenancies. It will force more people into insecure private renting as the council housing stock dwindles. Estates could be classed as brownfield sites and 'regenerated' with a minimum of social housing stock as part of any new housing development. Several councils have already stated their opposition to the Act, and the campaign has already succeeded in forcing the Government to drop the proposal to make tenants 'pay to stay' if their household income reached a certain threshold. The proposed Right to Buy for Housing Association tenants has also been postponed as councils were to be forced to sell their high value properties to subsidise these discounted sales. What we need is more genuinely affordable housing to rent; a comprehensive council house building programme that would take the heat out of the property market and provide the thousands of homeless and inadequately housed people with secure and decent homes..
