Red Kite housing is Wycombe’s ‘biggest scandal’, says Khalil Ahmed in election debate

Red Kite Community Housing’s handling of Wycombe’s social housing is the area’s ‘biggest scandal’, general election candidate Khalil Ahmed has said.

High Wycombe’s former mayor – who is standing for the Workers Party of Britain on July 4 – made the comments in a debate at Buckinghamshire New University last night.

He said: “[Red Kite] have taken away social houses that otherwise would have been useful for people that needed them.”

He was responding to a question from a member of Red Kite in the audience who asked how candidates would support the need for more homes and their funding.

In a follow-up statement Ahmed criticised the housing association for disposing of a ‘huge number of properties to tenants under the right to buy entitlement’ after it bought Wycombe District Council’s entire social housing stock for £65 million in 2011.

READ MORE: Wycombe election candidates quizzed on Gaza, buses and new housing in feisty debate

He told the Bucks Free Press: “The transfer of housing stock to Red kite for a fraction of the actual worth has been one of the major scandals that the local government has been responsible for.”

Ahmed also slammed Red Kite for selling off the Castlefield ‘star blocks’, for not ‘replenishing’ its housing stock and for ‘cherry picking’ the better properties for private companies, Twenty11 and Edenmead.

Red Kite’s communications chief Julie Gamble-Kempe said Edenmead built and sold its own homes to help ‘cross-fund’ the development of new rental properties for Red Kite and that no homes were ‘transferred into it’.

She also said that Twenty11 provided ‘affordable rental homes’ from ‘group builds and transfers’, which were not ‘cherry-picked’.

In a statement, she told the Free Press: “We are keen to work with our future MP to ensure that housing is pushed up the agenda and that funding is released to help more much-needed social housing to be built.

“Currently, the building costs involved and the hoops that need to be jumped through for planning make it financially impossible to do this, which was the case at Castlefield.

“The right to buy is a legal right for tenants that transferred from the local authority when the stock was originally purchased.

“As the majority of the sales revenue is returned to the local authority, this makes the replacement of homes sold extremely difficult and requires Red Kite to borrow money to build.”

Red Kite says it plans to create 500 homes for the community, with 212 properties already built across five sites.

A further 68 homes are currently under construction, with a further 110 in the pipeline.

📢 "Why wait for news? With Bucks Free Press get real-time updates directly on our ad-free app. Subscribe for unlimited access to our digital edition and enjoy 80% fewer ads on our website. Click here to find out more about how to get your news, your way, every day. #UnlimitedNews #AdLightExperience" 📢