Housing minister John Healey on a visit to Brimington Common, Chesterfield last Thursday told local residents that secure council house tenancies could be a thing of the past.

He explained how Tory plans would seriously affect council house tenants, with proposals that include hiking up rent levels and putting all tenants on short-term leases.

“This would mean that tenants lose security of tenure and that older people could be forced out of their family homes” ,said the minister at Toby Perkins’ most recent Listening to Chesterfield event held at the Manor Road Rest Centre in Brimington.

He also expressed disappointment that Chesterfield Borough Council had not applied for all the recently available government funding to build more council houses in Chesterfield and Staveley.

Toby Perkins, Labour’s Parliamentary candidate for Chesterfield told residents at the public meeting that the Liberal Democrat Council in chesterfield had applied for funding to build just FOUR houses in Chesterfield whilst some Councils were now building over 200 under the same scheme.

“There has been a lot of talk from the Lib Dems about what the Government will and won’t let them do, now the time has come for them to back up their words with action, and of course, once again, they haven’t been able to do that.”

Toby continued: “Since John became Housing Minister, there has been tremendous progress on Council housing. However there is still more to do, I welcome John’s commitment to put proposals forward which will allow Councils to retain rent money and abolish the Housing Revenue Account which will make widescale Council housing building programmes commonplace again, and will be campaigning for that to happen sooner rather than later.”