EACH week, the Advertiser will be asking each party a question on a pressing matter for Test Valley residents. This week, each party was asked to answer the following:

“How do you plan to tackle Andover’s housing crisis, ensuring there are enough new homes for young people whilst protecting the beauty of the natural environment?”

Here’s what they had to say:

Andover Independents Party

Building new, affordable housing whilst improving our environment, is crucial to the Andover Independents Party’s commitment to achieving carbon neutrality and sustainable growth. Redeveloping redundant buildings and incorporating significant residential development in the Andover Town Centre regeneration, will reduce the housing footprint, loss of green spaces and breathe new life into Andover.  The Andover Independents Party wants:

  • Annual £10m investment in social rent properties.
  • Redundant office/garage blocks redeveloped as one/two/three bed apartments.
  • Communal one/two bedroom ‘downsizing’ developments to free up family homes.
  • Social housing waiting list system overhauled.
  • 10 trees planted for every new bedroom.

Conservatives

Conservative-run Test Valley has a phenomenal record of delivering new homes, whilst also using developer contributions to provide additional green spaces, parks and nature reserves. We recently received a letter from the Secretary of State praising our efforts for consistently meeting our housing delivery targets whilst also providing record numbers of affordable homes. In 2019/20 we delivered 273 new affordable homes, compared to a target of 200 - and have delivered over 1,000 in the past 4-years. We’ll shortly be consulting on a new Local Plan to ensure we continue to build the right homes in the right places.

Labour Party

Labour is the party of housing. We believe that decent, stable and long-term housing is one of the foundations for human flourishing. We want to see the Borough Council invest in creating new social housing in Andover. It cannot be right that a family must wait six years on average for a family home. We want to see housing brought back under Borough Council control, so residents are no longer at the whim of housing associations, who seemingly only care about collecting the rent, but elected Councillors will once again be accountable to their residents for decent housing and shorter waiting lists.

Liberal Democrats

If we want to tackle the lack of affordable housing for young people and protect our natural environment, we need to change the Conservative councils’ approach to planning. We should not be planning for more houses, but for more homes. Amenities should be in place early with green spaces including parks, community gardens and allotments. Developers are often delivering substandard houses and have the cards stacked in their favour. Enough planning applications are granted, but developers are not building enough. This keeps their prices and profits up. Demand Better. Go Green. The best way forward is to vote Liberal Democrat.

Stuart Waue

More space efficient house & flat design would allow for more dwellings & still keep a sensible percentage of green space. 3 storey houses allow for more space inside whilst only having a small footprint. The biggest problem for young people is affordability. Discount schemes for buyers with local connections could be subsidised by funds from land sales. I also firmly believe that responsibility for social housing should be taken back to Borough Councils with better discount schemes offered to long term tenants to allow them (& their descendants) better access to the property ladder, with funds raised from such sales reinvested into more social housing.

UKIP

We will increase the supply of housing by identifying - long term dormant land held by central and local government that can be released.

 To ease the immediate problem, we will encourage the building of Modular Housing, made by British companies, which are inexpensive, quick to build and are highly energy efficient.

UKIP will replace the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) with fresh national planning guidelines that will prioritise brownfield sites for new housing and genuinely protect the green belt and countryside, and give local authorities greater ability to refuse planning permission for inappropriate developments.

Other parties did not respond to this question