Residents in Salford are being forced out of the city's newly constructed high-rise developments, a local councillor has said.
Bob Clarke, who leads Salford Conservatives, said it was 'not acceptable' for new high-density projects to contain no affordable housing options.
His remarks came during proceedings at Salford Civic Centre on July 16. "We're building thousands and thousands of flats and nobody can afford to buy them," Cllr Clarke said.
Salford council's housing framework mandates that all high-density apartment developments must ensure a minimum of 20 per cent of properties remain affordable.
The policy also permits a reduction in affordable housing numbers if 'all practicable options have been exhausted for delivering the minimum affordable housing requirement. '.
Cllr Clarke, who serves on Salford council's planning applications committee, said he has 'complained for years' about tower block projects receiving approval despite lacking affordable accommodation.
Salford mayor Paul Dennett attributed the issue to national planning regulations enabling developments to proceed without affordable housing provision.
"There are different challenges when it comes to building high-rises," Mr Dennett explained.
"We have the perennial challenges of viability, certainly in places like Salford and the north of England.
"There is considerable public money going into schemes to get them on the way, so more needs to be done to ensure that we deliver truly affordable homes in high-rise developments, I absolutely agree on that.
"But at the moment from where it stands, the national planning policy framework includes a clause that allows developers – if they can prove that schemes are not economically viable – to not contribute to our policy requirements, i.e affordable housing."
Salford is currently seeing several significant regeneration projects aimed at increasing the availability of homes and addressing the housing and homelessness crisis.
However, there have been instances where the council has approved developments in recent years that did not include any affordable housing.
For example, an application for a co-living tower on Gorton Street in the Greengate area was approved in September last year. The proposal included 568 studio apartments within a 42-storey complex on a former surface-level car park.
The development was sanctioned without any affordable housing after an assessment demonstrated 'a lack of viability which precludes the provision of affordable units within the scheme. '.
Instead, the applicant agreed to contribute £400,000 towards a comprehensive package of planning obligations, as noted in a council report.
Another project, an 18-storey tower at the Springfield Business Centre on Springfield Lane, also received planning permission from Salford council last year despite the absence of affordable homes in the plans.
At a council meeting in April 2024 to determine the fate of the development, Salford MP Rebecca Long-Bailey submitted a statement imploring the council to reject the application.
Her remarks were pointed: "It would be a staggering dereliction of duty to approve a housing development of this size that did not include any affordable homes."
The council went ahead and approved the project. The justification given for the absence of affordable homes within the scheme was 'viability concerns', although the developers proposed a contribution of £100,000 towards off-site affordable housing.
