Affordable rural housing under threat

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/13/affordable-rural-housing-new-threat

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Alan Wright, chairman of Porlock parish council in Exmoor, has seen affordable housing become the key issue for many locals since moving to this part of Somerset 10 years ago. As in much of rural England, house prices are high and incomes low.

With younger people priced out of a booming property market, the area now has the oldest population in the country, he says. Only 7% are in the 21-39 age group, while over half are aged over 60. “This is not a healthy demography,” says the former management consultant. “Younger people can’t afford to live here any more.”

Two years ago, the parish council supported the housing association Hastoe Group in completing 15 affordable homes for local people in the attractive coastal village of Porlock. The homes were subsidised by money raised from private developers as a price for local planning permission.

Wright is now searching for smaller sites on which to build more affordable homes. But a new central planning directive scrapping a requirement for developers to provide affordable homes on smaller sites will make it tougher.

The change to planning rules, slipped through by communities and local government secretary Eric Pickles at the end of last year, means that affordable housing no longer has to be part of the mix on small-scale developments. The problem is that most rural housing is on small sites of fewer than 10 homes – and without a compulsion, precious few low-cost homes will be built.

In the Dartmoor village of Holne, where Hastoe completed another seven subsidised homes last June, one of the new residents, Julian Juste, says: “If we didn’t get our house we’d have had to move out of the area.” Juste, 37, is a plant hire driver and his partner Claire Austin is a care worker. They have two young children.

Sue Chalkley, chief executive of Hastoe, the biggest single provider of affordable rural homes in England, says Pickles’s new directive comes at a time when it is receiving calls from parish councils every week asking for affordable homes to be built in their villages.

“While you still get ‘nimbys’, a much more mature debate is developing where people see the reality that local kids have nowhere to live and want something done.”

For Lewis Rose, the Conservative leader of Derbyshire Dales district council, the provision of affordable rural housing has been high on his list of priorities. By using the planning system to raise extra money from developers, his authority created a ringfenced fund to leverage cash from housing associations and plug a hole left by declining government grants.

“It had wide support,” he says. “People realised that youngsters cannot afford to stay in the area unless we do all we can to make it easier for them through reducing housing costs.”

Over the past 10 years, the council has channelled £1.2m to associations to help deliver more than 1,000 homes from shared ownership to social renting. “They torpedoed our scheme at a stroke by an arbitrary change to planning rules,” Rose says of the Pickles directive. “It came out of the blue. It meant that our whole affordable housing strategy was severely damaged. I was appalled.”

The result for Derbyshire Dales was immediate. A further £407,000 of funding in the pipeline was lost. “I am afraid ‘Mr Builder’ will not provide affordable housing left to himself,” Rose says.

He complained to his local Tory MP, transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin. “I think he was taken aback because he realises the seriousness of the matter,” says the council leader. McLoughlin is now looking into an issue which, across England, has pitched Tory councils, and many other organisations, against a seemingly obdurate Department for Communities and Local Government.

Ostensibly, the new policy is meant to encourage smaller building firms by removing an obligation for affordable housing on sites with fewer than 10 houses; in national parks, the threshold has been set at under five homes.

Campaign groups have sounded alarm bells over the growing crisis in rural housing – already more severely hit by council house sales than urban areas. Only 12% of housing stock is classed as “social”, compared with almost 20% in towns and cities according to a report out next month by the rural housing policy review group, chaired by Lord Best. At the same time, earnings in the countryside, averaging just under £20,000 annually, are about £7,000 below urban areas.

According to the National Housing Federation, house prices in rural England are 11 times the average salary, and often rising faster than in towns.

In an open letter to Pickles, the 10 national parks in England have warned that his plan “risks seriously our ability to facilitate affordable housing for local needs”. Crucially, they fear policies that prioritise affordable housing “in perpetuity” – legal agreements stipulating that affordable homes must go to local people – will be also be undermined.

Jim Bailey, chair of National Parks England, says without these agreements, towns and villages in places like Exmoor and the North York moors could die. “They risk becoming either commuter settlements or groupings of second homes – not living, working communities,” he says.

But attempts to open a dialogue with either Pickles or his planning minister, Brandon Lewis, have failed. Some say letters have gone unanswered, with planned meetings cancelled.

For Conservatives such as Rose, the directive flies in the face of localism. He says: “They just don’t listen to folk on the ground.”

• This article was amended on 14 January 2015 to correct a misspelling of Sue Chalkley’s name.