Last night was Crawley Borough Council’s final meeting of the council year. The day-to-day work of the council and councillors continues year-round, but during the period running into the annual local elections formal council meetings largely cease (with the exception of Planning and any Licensing committees where needed to comply with legislation).
While this helps councillors to get out knocking doors in the evening, the driver is the Pre-Election Sensitivity period (previously referred to as ‘Purdah’), during which public sector resources cannot be used to do anything which may constitute advancing a political issue.
However, the consequence of this is that we tend to have a very busy February meeting, running through the Annual Budget alongside all the regular organisational and political decision-making, which is then followed only a month later with a March only a single committee-cycle later, and a very busy July meeting (the meeting in late May to re-convene the council is only legally allowed to run through the process of achieving this, as per the Local Government Act 1972).
The final result is that very little of actual meeting ends up going on the agenda for this meeting and last night was much the same. We had a few amendments tidying up the language in the constitution and a motion from the Conservatives on social housing which largely gave the Labour Group an opportunity to highlight quite why we’re proud of our record delivering new affordable housing against the greatest ever set of restrictions on delivery imposed upon a local authority.
Lastly, we had the only real issue of substance on the agenda, the second home council tax premium. A few years into the Coalition, the Government took the decision to hand decisions around council tax discounts over to local authorities, but at the same time to only provide 90% of the existing funding. Effectively, we were being told to make a 10% cut to the scheme.
While the majority of the discounts took the form of council tax benefit, there were also reductions available for several other categories of homes, such as empty homes. Crawley Borough Council adopted a scheme which put those on the lowest incomes first, in the process removing the other discounts.
A few years later we were allowed to implement a extra premium on properties which had been left empty for several years, which we then increased as soon as we were permitted.
In 2022, the Government announced that they would be allowing councils to put a premium on second homes and a few days before standing down as Leader I committed the council towards introducing it in Crawley.
The legislation finally came into effect at the end of last year and the council got to work on the proposal, with the change finally taking effect yesterday.
Overall, this isn’t going to do much for Crawley Borough Council’s finances. Second homes aren’t that common and as the council is setting the discount rules for council tax as a whole, West Sussex will get almost 80% of the money raised. In proposing the policy, Michael Jones–my successor as council leader–called for the extra funding to be put towards much-needed local road repairs.
In practice though, this was never about money. Crawley has declared a housing emergency, we have hundreds of families at any given time living in cramped hotel rooms, sometimes many miles from home, and the problem keeps getting worse at an increasingly fast rate. Ultimately, this proposal was about the morality of homes going unused when such desperate need exists. One can only hope that this moves things back in the right direction.
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Peter Lamb for Crawley 