Questions are invited from Elected Members about items on the Cabinet agenda. 15 minutes will be set aside for Member Question Time, if required.
Notice of any Member question must be given to the Monitoring Officer by midday Friday 10th October 2025.
Minutes:
The following question was submitted in advance of the meeting by Councillor Carol Birchmore:
In a recent Manchester Evening News article, it is reported that Andy Burnham has admitted that setting targets for private developers to build or pay for affordable housing doesn't work. The report goes on to say that currently, the number of council homes is falling in eight of the 10 boroughs in Greater Manchester with only Salford and Trafford building more than they're losing in the last year. Will the Pyramid Park plans provide the Council with the opportunity to build some of their own genuinely affordable houses rather than relying on developers to build so called “affordable” housing and is there Government money available to do that?
Responding, Councillor O’Brien clarified the subjectivity of ‘Affordable Housing’, and reported that what the Council was aiming to do on as many of our directly owned sites as possible was maximise the amount of ‘Affordable’ (in broad terms) housing available. In some cases like Pyramid Park we will work with a registered provider who will have that ability, access to capital, and experience of building properties but we would retain the nomination rights. The Leader advised that this probably sits in-between the definition of 80% affordable and of social housing. They wouldn’t be Council properties in our HRA or managed by Bury Housing Services, but would also not be an arbitrary discount on a market figure.
The Leader advised that the Council had ambitions to go further, including utilising the announcement of National funding, which wasn’t available when pursuing Pyramid Park. The only government money we have been using is the GM Brownfield Housing Fund, which we have used where we can appropriately across a number of sites. This is why it’s so important that the new Government has announced so much additional money for social and affordable homes, because by working with them and Homes England and the Combined Authority, it should make it easier to build truly affordable homes and social homes.
In short, we think Pyramid Park will be a great site, with the intention for it to be a mixed intergenerational scheme, offering something that the market probably wouldn’t deliver if we purely sold it off to them. It won’t be social housing in our stock but it will certainly be genuinely affordable for a lot of people in Bury to access, which is what we need in a sustainable location, on a Brownfield site that has been difficult to bring to market for a variety of reasons, and making contributions to the biodiversity net gain as well, within the Town Centre Masterplan.
A further supplementary question was submitted:
Today Manchester City Council has announced that it is going to build 700 homes on land they own. The way they’re doing it is working with Manchester Housing Providers Partnership, which is social housing companies. From the plans they’re released, about 60% of that is going to be social housing rather than affordable housing, with the remaining 40% being 80% market price (Manchester Living Rent). Is there any chance we could have a look at doing that sort of idea where we retain our land and build genuinely affordable homes?
Councillor O’Brien reported that he didn’t know the detail of the Manchester scheme. Manchester benefits from a scalability of size that Bury struggles to do, even on a site like Pyramid Park. Having said that, that is exactly what we now want to explore; this type of investment could be a game-changer and, when we now look at our sites it gives us more realistic consideration of delivering our own direct social housing. So far we’ve really tried to work in partnership with registered providers and we’re doing well with the resources and capacity we have, but we are always looking to maximise affordability balanced against viability. If we can on future sites, with the additional money, it would be our aspiration to look at a different way than we are currently operating in.