Morton Road Park plan. The homes were to be built on the area of hard standing marked in yellow

PLANS to build new council homes on a stretch of concrete have been scrapped after opposition from hundreds of residents.

The proposal to build 18 new homes on the “hard-standing” area of Morton Road Park would have made a small dent in the council’s need to house the 16,500 people on the social housing wait list.

But resistance from neighbours – who said the four-storey building would block their view of the fireworks and take away a children’s play area – have left the council rowing back on the scheme.

The decision comes in the same week as the Town Hall’s housing chief John Woolf told the Tribune that he was “pulling all levers to maximise genuinely affordable homes” and lauded achieving 20 per cent of Labour’s housing manifesto commitment as “an absolute success”.

In a letter sent to residents at the beginning of February, a Town Hall official announced that the project at Morton Road would not progress “based on discussions and the feedback from residents”.

Some 350 people had signed a petition opposing the plan to build 18 new homes in Canonbury.

The “hard-standing” area earmarked for the development is beside a children’s area and neighbour Kate Rushbrook said that the concrete space was used by children to play five-a-side.

Labour councillors have long argued that the struggle to deliver new homes is due to an exponential increase in building costs, triggered by things like Brexit, Covid, the war in Ukraine, and an increase in the price of concrete.

In 2022 the Labour manifesto promised that over the next four years they would build “750 brand new council homes, as part of 1,550 new genuinely affordable and social homes for local people”.

Since that promise, the Town Hall have built 354. Speaking to the Tribune, Cllr Woolf said that, nationally, building had “ground to a halt” since 2022 and that the council’s house-building record “given the climate” was an “absolute success”.

But Michael Hill, who works for the think-tank Britain Remade, which studies planning regulations and reform, said that the cancellation of the Morton Road scheme showed that some of the challenges were in the control of the Town Hall.

He told the Tribune: “You don’t have to give in to nimby campaigners when you want to build on your own land. This application didn’t even get to planning, they’ve given up at the first hurdle.”

Mr Hill added: “Unlike some private schemes, there is no appeal route here. It could have built these 18 homes under the current planning system. It chose not to.”

On the decision at Morton Road, Cllr Woolf said: “Local people are at the heart of everything we do, and we listened carefully to feedback from the local community on our proposals for Morton Road.

“As we’ve previously set out, this was never a foregone conclusion and our commitment was always to hold an initial, open, and honest conversation with local people based on early designs.

“Based on the valuable feedback we received from residents as part of this process – and because the area is a well-used open space – we took the difficult decision to draw this process to a close. To be clear – our priority remains to build more genuinely affordable homes for our residents.”