BOROUGH councillors have postponed making a decision on long-promised affordable housing in Brentor – after the local councillors slammed a housing needs survey being used to justify abandoning it as ‘deeply flawed’.

Cllr Terry Pearce told WDBC’s hub committee that the survey which an officers’ report said proved there was insufficent need to go ahead with homes mooted for 20 years, did not provide the full picture. He read out a letter from a parishioner which said it was ‘cobblers’ that need was not there among people who grew up in the village.

The Brentor scheme was intended to provide ‘the first council housing in a generation’ along with a similar scheme in Lamerton. The borough council spent quarter of a million pounds of Government cash on design and survey work but neither scheme has yet been built.

After the Lamerton scheme was abandoned last year, WDBC is now proposing to abandon the Brentor scheme for 12 homes on an ‘exception site’, nine of which to be affordable and all being family homes of two and three bedrooms.

It says that the fresh housing needs survey in April showed only five one-bedroom properties and one two-bedroom properties were needed.

The report claimed that ‘no one under 55 had competed the survey’ so they could not prove that family homes of two to three bedroom were needed and thus ‘recommended that the council does not progress with the Brentor scheme any further’.

However, Cllr Terry Pearce, who represents Brentor on the borough council, condemned the survey, conducted by Devon Communities Together for the council, as ‘deeply flawed’. He read out a letter from a parishioner, who said: ‘The report is cobblers. I filled one in and my son filled one in. Neither of us are over 55. With these non-questions they asked, can we conclude that the whole exercise has been designed by West Devon Borough Council to stitch us up and allow West Devon to give up on the plan?’

Cllr Pearce added: ‘That is the feeling in the community.’

He said that the landwner who is ‘putting forward the land at a very reasonable price’ had ‘just been left in limbo not knowing what to do’.

Cllr Pearce asked where the money put aside for the sceme by WDBC would go, if the development was abandoned. ‘That money put aside for this development,has that money been allocated for Spring Hill [homeless accommodation in Tavistock] or Okehampton? There is a lack of trust and confidence in the authority. We have asked the question and the parish council has asked the question and we have not been given a proper response at all.’

‘You had all this information five or six years ago and the plans were drawn up with costs by a reputable architect in Totnes and they have just been sitting there.’

Council officer Chris Brook, director of place and enterprise, said it was ‘challenging to get housing figures’ in Brentor, saying ‘these are the facts on the ground’.

However, Cllr Pearce pointed out that children who grew up in the village have left precisely because of the lack of accommodation.‘The problem we have got is we have 42 second homes and holiday homes in the parish as a whole and the price of properties now are just ridiculous.

‘There was a two-up two-down which came up which sold in three days for £268,000. No young people have got a chance of staying in the village and that is why the scheme is so important.’

Cllr Ric Cheadle that it seemed strange for the borough council to be declaring a housing crisis on one side and not going ahead with its own affordable housing scheme. ‘Something doesn’t add up to me,’ he said.

Council leader Cllr Neil Jory admitted: ‘One of the reasons we were keen on a scheme like this was it would go somewhere to redress the balance and get some life back into these communities.’ The hub committee voted to defer a decision on the scheme until its next meeting in a month.