Call to use car park site for social homes

Opposition councillors have called for a car park site set aside for new housing to be used to build social homes.

Reigate and Banstead Borough Council (RBBC) is pursuing the redevelopment of High Street Car Park in Horley into about 40 homes.

The authority's overview and scrutiny committee asked the executive on Wednesday to reconsider a decision from September , external to sell the car park on the open market.

Green group head Jonathan Essex said the authority should not be "selling off assets to the private sector", but council leader Richard Biggs said the decision was "a sensible use of resources".

Biggs told BBC Radio Surrey the car park was "a challenging site next to the railway" so the council executive wanted to put out "a conditional request to see what came in".

"This is very early stage," the Conservatives council leader said. "Let's see what the art of the possible is."

But Essex told Wednesday's meeting that the council should use "reserved funding, which was allocated for affordable housing, to deliver affordable housing" on the site.

He said money was set aside for the purpose and to not follow through "would seem to be somewhat absurd".

Fellow Green councillor Gillian Vischer told the committee: "We really shouldn't be asking the market when it's been clearly shown that they can't provide the answer to this and they can't provide the social rented homes that we need."

Executive member for finance and assets, Ben Green, told the meeting that the sites were not part of that cash reserve.

He said the council could spend money and time before it was absorbed into the new East Surrey Council on studies or it could "go to the market and we can ask them".

"If we get a good offer from the market then we can take it and we can develop the site, and we will have achieved something with the limited amount of time we have left," he said.

"If we don't then we can decline the offers and simply pass the site over to East Surrey, and they can decide what they do with it."

A proposal to redevelop Gloucester Road Car Park in Redhill, which were progressed at the same time as the Horley scheme , will continue as before.

RBBC said the council was " committed to delivering new affordable homes for local people".

"The proposals for Gloucester Road car park in Redhill and High Street car park in Horley are about taking proactive steps to unlock council-owned town centre sites to help achieve this," the council spokesperson added.

"Both sites are allocated development sites in our exiting local plan."

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