Councillors in Oldham have voted to write to Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner asking to pull out of the Greater Manchester house building scheme, Places for Everyone (PfE).
The motion passed 30 votes to 29.
This move to withdraw from the agreement comes after the Labour party lost its majority on the council in the May local elections.
The ‘Places for Everyone’ scheme is a long term housing plan to build housing and infrastructure across the city region.
The scheme lays out development plans (until 2039) for nine of the ten boroughs of Greater Manchester. This should include building 175,000 new homes.
The Places for Everyone scheme has had a difficult journey, with the Liberal Democrat council of Stockport voting in 2020 to abstain from the scheme, making it an outlier from the nine other councils in Greater Manchester.
Despite these initial setbacks, the plan was signed off by the other Greater Manchester councils in March of 2024.
Within the plan, of the 175,000 new homes, 18,500 were to be built on the greenbelt.
Places for Everyone aims to maximise building on brownfield land while protecting the greenbelt.
However, the Liberal Democrats on Oldham council believe that developing on the greenbelt will do “nothing” to alleviate the housing crisis.
Questions surrounding the legality of Oldham council leaving the agreement have been raised by Paul Smith, managing director of The Strategic Land Group, who spoke to the Manchester Mill saying:
“The only way it cannot be their adopted development plan is if they replace it with something else”.
As a result of the questionable legality, former leader of Oldham council, Sean Fielding believed that the council would remain in the scheme.
Like much of the country, Oldham is facing a housing shortage, with rents rising faster than anywhere in Greater Manchester.
Currently, more than 6,000 people are on a waiting list for social housing.
The Mancunion has previously reported on wider frustration with the rate of construction in Greater Manchester.
