Councillor Luisa Porritt stepped down as a councillor in Belsize at the last Town Hall elections

THE former leader of the Liberal Democrats in Camden told her party’s annual conference that she had been priced out of the area by stratospheric housing costs.

Luisa Porritt gave up being a councillor in the Belsize ward at the last Town Hall elections and has since moved out of the borough.

Back on the main conference stage, she joined a rebellion against the party leadership’s plans to drop national house-building targets.

Members who wanted to keep a set aim to build 380,000 a year had been left furious when former leader Tim Farron told a debate that they were behaving like “Thatcherites” – a comment which current London mayoral candidate Rob Blackie publicly later told him: “That’s below you, Tim”.

In a tight vote on the conference floor in Bournemouth, which left leader Sir Ed Davey and his front-bench colleagues embarrassed, members voted to keep the target.

The party’s rules – unlike those followed by Labour and the Tories – means these votes at conference effectively become binding.

Ms Porritt said in her speech that she had been proud herself to stand as the Lib Dem mayoral candidate before Mr Blackie and to “serve as a councillor in Camden, a part of the country where the average house price is now well over a million pounds.”

She told the hall: “Typically, those on the housing waiting list have to wait for four years and not uncommonly a decade for somewhere affordable to live.

“I’ve seen first-hand how the squeeze on supply has driven residents out of the area they call home. I was one of them, because I couldn’t afford the private rental costs of Camden – and to save to buy my first home at the same time.”

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Ms Porritt – celebrated by activists from the Young Liberals group wearing “build more bloody houses” t-shirts – added: “For most young people today, the thought of buying a home is a pipedream – the rental costs they face are extortionate. If we are not willing to be brave and say we will tackle the issue of supply from social housing to the private sector, we will continue to deprive not only young people but many others of affordable, safe, good quality homes.

“The Conservatives and Labour have failed to deliver the homes that people desperately need. Just two years ago, we adopted an ambitious national housing target in line with independent estimates of what the need is in this country. Tim – were we Thatcherites then?”

The party’s leadership believes a system of targets can be played by developers for their own means but Ms Porritt said she was well aware of how some companies worked.

“I’ve seen the worst of unchecked behaviour by developers,” she said. “In the ward I used to represent there’s a site that still not begun construction – eight years after approval.

“We opposed that development because the community were right to foresee that the developer would let them down. But if we don’t set an ambition for the number of homes this country needs, we won’t scratch the surface of the housing crisis.”

She was referring to the stalled skyscraper plan at 100 Avenue Road – paused after developers tried to renegotiate planning permission with no affordable housing.

Mr Farron, now the party’s environment spokesman said: “Vague targets let and empower developers to build the houses that they want but never … the homes that we desperately need, especially that young people actually need. The authors of amendment one do not mean it, but it is pure Thatcherism.”