Council chiefs have vowed to work harder to ease Shropshire’s housing crisis, with the focus on providing affordable homes and bringing vacant properties back in to use.

The council has signed up to a new joint housing strategy with Herefordshire to address the problem. It will see the council use its own surplus land assets, which are deemed suitable for housing development, for affordable homes.

And in addition to a set percentage of affordable homes being built on development sites, there will be a percentage of different housing made available to reflect local housing needs.

Action will be also taken to ensure ‘consistent and robust data’ is collected when parish councils assess housing need.

A report to Shropshire cabinet yesterday said: “The strategy will ensure there is a focused, effective and joined up approach to identifying and tackling housing need across Herefordshire and Shropshire.

“The consultation enabled the views of a wide range of stakeholders to influence the finalised strategy.

“Without a co-ordinated and strategic approach to housing which takes into account the views of stakeholders, it is possible that services would not be delivered in a co-ordinated manner and that resources could be wasted.”

Councillor Mal Price told yesterday’s meeting he was pleased to see the country’s housing crisis was now in the public eye, with several television programmes aired recently looking at the issue.

He said one particular problem the council had been looking at and working on was the number of empty properties left unused .

He said at one stage there was about 4,400 empty properties in Shropshire and work was carrying on to bring that number down.

He said: “We set up an empty housing post and we set up an empty housing strategy.

“We are in the process of bidding for government funding to go to empty homes.

“We have got to make progress. We have houses in Shropshire built 24 years go and stood empty for 22.