Farmland housing decision and leftover government cash among questions put to council leader

From controversial planning decisions to help for the homeless - along with what next for Hanley in Stoke-on-Trent - the city's Labour council leader Jane Ashworth was quizzed by BBC Radio Stoke listeners on Tuesday.

It came after what could only be described as a whirlwind of a week in local and national politics.

On Thursday, the government announced its decision on how local councils will be organised in Staffordshire, which will see the 10 councils in the county scrapped and replaced with two new authorities.

Then on Monday, the new Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham entered Number 10 and announced his "cost of living government".

The first policy pledge Burnham made as the new prime minister was to end rough sleeping, an issues that resonates with the city of Stoke-on-Trent.

The government said an additional £340m would be provided to support the policy, which is expected to provide 1,200 homes and "intensive support" for at least 3,000 people in England over a five-year period.

But Ashworth said the answer, for her area, was "not simply more accomodation".

The leader said there was a difference between those who needed somewhere to sleep and people who were "entrenched" and unwilling to accept support.

According to Ashworth, there were about 50 people "not ready" to accept advice or help from various agencies for their drug or alcohol addictions.

Those were the issues she felt needed addressing, to go any way to reduce or "end" the number of rough sleepers in the city.

"We need something different, the current system isn't working, we're talking to government about the monkey dust problem, so we'll see what happens," she added.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council will cease to exist from April 2028, to be replaced by a new North Staffordshire Council, as mentioned above.

Ashworth believed the change would be a "big, exciting project" and deliver "'value for money" for residents.

The all-in-one authority will serve a population of 495,000 and deliver the running of all services from bin collections to social care.

The areas it will cover include Stoke-on-Trent, the Staffordshire Moorlands and Newcastle-under-Lyme borough.

While a decision has not yet been made on what this means for council tax rates, the leader dismissed the idea they could be harmonised with the current cheapest ones (Stoke) - meaning residents outside the city paying less.

Stoke-on-Trent has, for the last four years, used a government bailout loan to keep services afloat, and that has now racked up £60m in debt.

Stoke-on-Trent Central MP Gareth Snell claimed that in other areas that have been through similar reorganisation, they have had debt written off by the government.

But Ashworth said she was not confident the new authority would get any financial relief or subsidy from the government to wipe the debt.

Ashworth responded to a backlash from listeners about a cabinet decision to allow council owned farmland in Packmoor to be built on.

Residents who campaigned against the plans said they wanted the council to prove every brownfield site had been "exhausted"' before developing on green belt land.

The leader said she felt the practical concerns raised by residents were addressed, which led to the authority agreeing on a proposal to build no more than 816 homes, on more than a third of the land available.

The council is tasked with delivering 948 homes a year in Stoke-on-Trent by 2028 as part of the national drive for new housing.

In the latest draft of the local plan for the city council area, 73% of the sites earmarked for development are brownfield.

The councillor argued that while adopting a "brownfield first" policy was right, the sites were not very big so did not give the authority enough land to meet those building targets.

The arguably ill-fated, long awaited and stalled development of Etruscan Square in Hanley is finally due to undergo work, starting in November, according to Ashworth.

She said the project would start with demolishing the former Iceland store on the site, before building housing.

The site was allocated £20m of levelling up money, secured by the council's previous Conservative administration.

Reports in May revealed that £31m of Stoke's levelling up funding, was in fact unspent.

Ashworth tried to reassure listeners that the money would not run out, and it would be spent in time.

Meanwhile, in Tunstall, levelling up seemed to have hit the buffers, with plans to develop the historic Tunstall library and baths site refused.

The leader admitted this £3.5m would be allocated to another area, but insisted Tunstall would not miss out and the council would "spend it on something else" in the town.

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