Town councillors in Dorchester are to think again about their affordable homes policy.

The authority had to back down over proposals to sell off some playing fields for development earlier this year – after facing petitions and social media campaigns to persuade them to back down.

The council has now said it will not be looking again at the sites – at least for the foreseeable future. Helping provide affordable housing in Dorchester has been one of the council’s main policy objectives.

Senior councillor Trevor Jones said he was now ‘at a loss’ to know how the council pursued the affordable homes policy, or even if it should.

“Clearly we had a big set-back…we said our top priority is affordable housing, but we didn’t persuade anyone outside this chamber,” he told the council’s policy committee on Tuesday evening (15th).

“We should now question whether it’s still our top priority, or an empty sentiment.”

Councillors backed his resolution to bring a report on possible options back to the next policy committee meeting.

Cllr Richard Biggs said there may be other possibilities. He suggested that the town council offices in North Square could be vacated and used for flats, with staff moving to a more modern office building, or by identifying other sites suitable for housing, even if they were not owned by the council.

Cllr Janet Hewitt called for landlords in the town to consider renting out space above many of the town centre shops and businesses.

“Some have two or three floors which are not being used…I know a lot are owned by pension funds and there are other issues but when there is a housing crisis we can’t justify all that space being empty.”

Other ideas including encouraging more people with an empty room , or two, to allow people to rent. Cllr Molly Rennie said the Government offered financial incentives to do that it terms of tax breaks. She said there was also a lot of empty property in the town which people chose not to live in, or let.