Cornwall Council’s Cabinet member for housing has angrily refuted claims that the council is not building homes for people in Cornwall.

During a long debate at a full council meeting on Tuesday regarding the council’s budget proposals, Conservative councillor Barry Jordan was highly critical of the council’s leading Liberal Democrat and Independent Cabinet.

He claimed: “You are building houses but they are not for the people of Cornwall.”

Cllr Jordan claimed that new homes were going to people outside of the county and not to those in need.

And in criticising the council’s support of development across Cornwall he added: “It is a disgrace what you are doing to this county.”

The comments drew an impassioned response from Andrew Mitchell, Cabinet member for housing.

Clearly angry he stated: “There is not one house that this council is building or any of its partners is building that will not first go to someone with a connection to Cornwall.”

Cllr Mitchell said that there were often conversations “down the pub” of people who claimed that council homes were going to people from Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool which he said was “simply not true”.

But he warned that Councillor Jordan standing up and stating would only encourage more people to make the false claims.

He said: “You are absolutely correct that people retire down here from other parts of the country and last year we had a net migration increase to Cornwall of just under 5,500 people – 19,000 people left Cornwall and 24,000 came into Cornwall.”

But he said there were no plans in place to “control the free movement of UK citizens in the UK”.

Cllr Mitchell said: “Please do not state we are wrong, wrong, wrong to say that we, as Cornwall Council, are building houses for anyone else but local Cornish families.”

It is not the first time that Cornwall Council has had to dispel rumours that council homes are being sold to councils elsewhere in the UK.

The rumour usually claims that inner city councils are buying homes in Cornwall for “undesirables”.

Manchester City Council has previously scotched the claims stating: “It’s incredible how often this story does the rounds. There must be someone – or a group of people – running around Cornwall convinced Manchester has a huge amount of money to buy up property across the UK.

“To be clear, there is no truth in Manchester Council buying up any property in Cornwall (or anywhere else for that matter).”

They added: “If nothing else, if we had decided to ship out Manchester people elsewhere (we’re not), we’d probably choose somewhere cheaper than Cornwall.”