Tory candidate slams wife’s housing policy

Henry Smith, the candidate for Crawley, told voters at a local election debate last week that he wanted to stop garden grabbing ‘because it not only destroys people’s ability to have a bit of green space around them but actually has an effect on local wildlife as well.

‘I’m generally against garden grabbing and the in-filling of green spaces.’

Mr Smith’s wife is Crawley Borough Council’s cabinet member for housing Jennifer Millar-Smith. She has pushed forward plans to build 219 new affordable homes on back gardens in the borough and believes the policy is ‘absolutely necessary’ to meet the government’s housing targets.

The council owns the gardens, but has leased them to homeowners under garden licence agreements for many years. It is now selling those sites to social housing developers.

Mr Smith told Inside Housing he had not intended to attack his wife’s policies directly, and he did not know enough about the specific development to comment. He said: ‘We’re both against garden grabbing: it is Conservative policy to be against building on gardens.

‘Technically, this isn’t garden grabbing as the council already owns the land.’

In other areas, housing is emerging at a key battlefield for this week’s local authority elections.

Some tenants and leaseholders are taking matters into their own hands and standing as independent candidates. If just one of the leaseholders and tenants standing in each ward in Islington wins a seat, the political balance of the council will change.

In Wycombe, Liberal Democrat councillors Trevor Snaith and Ray Farmer and Labour candidate Andrew Lomas have joined forces with council tenants in an appeal to housing minister John Healey over plans to sell off 6,500 Wycombe District Council homes.

They are concerned about possible changes to tenancy agreements which they say could put transferred council tenants at risk.