Council to buy Leicester student flats block for £5.5m

The building dates back to 1900 and was formerly a shoe and hosiery factory

A council wants to buy a £5.5m block of flats to create new affordable homes.

Leicester City Council has outlined plans to purchase the Zip Building so it can add 58 flats and bedsits to its housing stock.

The three storey block, in Rydal Street near the Leicester Royal Infirmary, will be bought using £2.4m generated from selling other council homes under Right to Buy laws.

The authority will rent the flats out to people on its housing waiting list.

The Labour council says the purchase will help it meet the growing demand for one and two-bedroom affordable housing across Leicester.

The building dates back to 1900 and was formerly a shoe and hosiery factory.

It was converted to residential use 12 years ago and is now student accommodation.

"Desperate need"

The council has negotiated the contract so that all existing tenancies can be honoured until the end of the current academic year in summer 2023.

The city council said it loses an average of 400 council homes annually through the Right to Buy scheme and that over the last 40 years its housing stock had been reduced from 36,000 to 20,000 homes.

However it says it will continue to use money generated from those sales to create more council homes.

Elly Cutkelvin, assistant city mayor for housing, said: "There is a desperate need for more affordable housing in the city.

"There is no doubt that the Right to Buy scheme has hit the supply of council housing hard.

"We're losing homes much faster that they are being built and it's time the Right to Buy scheme was abandoned. We have been forced to sell thousands of council houses over the past 30 years.

"That makes it absolutely vital that we invest our Right to Buy cash receipts back into addressing our local and critical need for more affordable homes."