DAVID Cameron has today announced an attack on low-rent council housing - in a controversial move to get more people on the property ladder.

The Prime Minister used today's Conservative Party conference speech to reveal that councils will be asked to scrap old planning laws in a bid to create "Generation Buy".

Before now housebuilders were forced to include an element of rented social housing in new developments - typically 40 per cent of schemes containing 12 or more units.

Instead, they will now be required to build 'starter homes' to be sold off to first-time buyers under the age of 40.

Mr Cameron wants 200,000 of them across Britain by 2020, with the affordable homes capped at £250,000 for sale with a 20 per cent discount off the true market value.

The policy will have big implications across Worcestershire, with councils asked to use powers known as Section 106 agreements to order developers to create homes to buy rather than rent.

Worcester MP Robin Walker said: "I recognise housing in Worcester is one of the key issues that affects people lives, it's certainly always been the biggest one at my surgeries.

"We need both rented affordable homes and ones to buy, it's good to see him address that and if it gets more people on the housing ladder that's got to be a good thing."

But some senior figures from Worcester Labour Party criticised the move, saying it "discriminates" against people on low incomes.

At the moment Worcester City Council insists on a 40 per cent affordable housing threshold with developers seeking to build 12 units or more, unless a builder can prove it is unviable.

Some 80 per cent of those affordable homes are then rented and the rest made available for shared ownership, unless there are "exceptional circumstances".

One example is Worcester's Middle Battenhall Farm, where developer Miller Homes has agreed to make 40 per cent of the 200-property complex 'affordable' as long as it secures permission to develop the land.  

It would mean 80 social houses on that site alone, but the planning application has gone to appeal and is currently up in the air.

Councillor Joy Squires, the deputy leader of Worcester's Labour group, said: "In a place like Worcester where levels of pay are low, buying a home will still be out of reach for many people in their 20s and 30s.

"What they need is good quality affordable housing for rent, and this policy will not deliver that.

"Developers will always seek to build for the maximum profit."

Councillor Roger Berry, a former Mayor of Worcester who sits on the city's planning committee, said: "It's terribly sad that after years of planning policy the 40 per cent planning requirement is being scrapped overnight.

"It's a betrayal to people on the housing waiting list who really need social renting housing.

"But I'm not surprised, I think it's very uncaring and discriminates against the poor."

Mr Cameron used today's speech in Manchester to say today's young people must move "from Generation Rent to Generation Buy".

"When a generation of hard-working men and women in their 20s and 30s are waking up each morning in their childhood bedrooms, that should be a wake-up call for us," he said.

We need a national crusade to get homes built."

Last week Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn took the opposite stance, saying there should be a massive Government wave of investment into social housing of around 100,000 properties a year - the biggest state-led programme since the 1970s.

WHAT ELSE DID CAMERON SAY?

Mr Cameron today said he wanted his time in power to be remembered as a "defining decade for our country, the turnaround decade, one which people will look back on and say, 'that's the time when the tide turned, when people no longer felt the current going against them, but working with them'."

He also:

- Promised to end discrimination and "finish the fight for real equality"

- Said he would not "duck" a fight over EU reform ahead of the UK's membership referendum, saying he had "no romantic attachment to the European Union"

- Pledged to tackle "big social problems" including extremism and "segregation" caused by faith schools

- Attacked "passive intolerance" of female genital mutilation and forced marriages

- Defended the decision to launch a drone attack that killed two British Islamic State jihadists, saying he had taken "decisive action to keep Britain safe"

* Are you in your 20s and 30s and looking to get on the property ladder? What did you think of Mr Cameron's speech? Email te@worcesternews.co.uk or ring 01905 742248.