COUNCIL leaders could launch a fight for York to opt out of Right to Buy laws to tackle the city's growing housing crisis.

Rival councillors are fighting over the best way to deal with high housing costs and a shortage of family homes in the city, and the row is set to dominate the last full meeting of City of York Council before the election.

The city should become the first in the country to be excluded from the Right to Buy laws for council housing, one group says, while another is pushing for major revisions to the Local Plan so it can be confirmed as soon as possible.

Labour councillor Dave Merrett said that housing struggles in York are worse than the national average with house prices 8.5 times average earnings. This means young people and families have to spend a disproportionately high slice of their income on housing.

It is a completely unsustainable trend, he adds, and stopping the loss of council houses through Right to Buy would help tackle it.

He added: "The average rental property is now far higher than the regional average and many local people simply cannot afford to live here. The younger generation is being badly let down and we must take action, cross party, to tackle this problem now."

The council's own figures show that since 2010, 129 council tenants have bought their homes, bringing in £8 million for the local authority.

Stephen Richardson, 57, bought his Groves home from the council in 2002, after living there since 1986. He believes that banning Right to Buy would make York a 'no go' for many people who, like him, could never afford to own a home any other way, and would penalise people like him who want to buy their council homes and live in them long-term.

Instead, the policy needs to be reformed to make sure local authorities get enough money from social housing sales to build replacement homes, he said.

Cllr Merrett is proposing a motion at Thursday's full council which would ask council chief executive Kersten England to push the Government to make York exempt from Right to Buy.

Conservative Cllr Paul Healey will also ask council staff to revise down the planned housing figures in the Local Plan to 700 new homes a year.

The plan has been stalled since a council meeting in autumn, with rows over how many new homes the city really needs. Official Government figures published earlier this month put the "baseline" need at 733 houses a year - lower than previously thought.

Cllr Healey's motion says: "Without realistic numbers, without reducing reliance on building on the green belt and without adequately reflecting the numbers of potential housing sites which are emerging all the time on brown field sites, York is also at risk of having its plan fail the inspector, which is exactly what happened to the City of Durham council recently.

"The Conservative group has maintained throughout the local plan process that house numbers needed to come down and recent data proves that we have been right all along.

“York needs a Local Plan and we urgently need to revise Labour assumptions of unrealistically high growth in order to get one.”

A third motion proposed by Labour councillor Stephen Burton asks the council to lobby for powers to control private rents and tenancies.