Rural Communities

Lord Best Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans for initiating this debate. I will speak as the chair of the Rural Housing Policy Review, which reported recently and among whose members were the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington. I am grateful to them for their support.

The review looked at all the earlier reports concerned with rural housing to see what progress had been made since they were written. We discovered that they all said similar things. Indeed, we underlined and emphasised the things that they had said before us, including that housing is absolutely critical to creating and sustaining a community—a vibrant community, as the right reverend Prelate said. The reports also said that people in rural areas have special housing difficulties. They face competition, if they want to buy a home, from commuters, retirees and, in some places, second-home owners and holiday-home providers. All this extra competition means that prices are 26% higher in rural areas than elsewhere while earnings are 19% lower. These are tough times for anyone aspiring to be a home owner and have a job in a rural community. There is also less affordable housing in these areas, not least because the right to buy for council housing has depleted the amount of social housing available in villages. Across rural England, social housing provision is at a level of 9% compared with 20% in urban areas.

So are there any positives out there or good things happening? Yes, there are. We noted in our report that the neighbourhood plans drawn up by local communities have often been positive. They have not just been about nimbys saying, “We don’t want anything in this village”; they have been positive in many areas. Parish councils are now coming to local housing associations, as was reported to us by two major housing associations working in rural areas, saying “Please come to this village. Help us to get some cottages built for local people”. Not everyone is against anything happening in rural England. We were also encouraged by landowners who are willing to provide sites either free or on very good terms.

Yet despite some of those positive signs, things are very difficult and tough. We had to draw attention to the fact that government, we suspected unwittingly, made life more difficult for those in rural areas by decreeing that any housebuilder producing executive homes or new development in a rural community—or anywhere else—should not be required to include any affordable housing in that provision, as they would be in most cases, if 10 homes or fewer were built. Well in rural areas, almost all developments are of 10 homes or fewer, so almost no additional affordable housing can be produced on the back of those housebuilders doing their work in rural areas. We were disappointed to say that things were not getting better, despite some good signs and some energy at the local level—not least on the part of church people, who are often to the fore in these matters.

After we produced our report, we were very sorry that another blow hit those concerned with housing in rural areas with the extension of the right to buy to the tenants of housing associations, as with those in council housing. These very large discounts of up to 70% off the price, or up to £77,000, seem quite an extravagance to many when the same amount of money would provide some three times as many shared-ownership homes for half-buy, half-rent. We could get three times as many built as new homes in other villages.

However, that does not express the real problem, which is the loss of the homes themselves even if they could be replaced on a one for one basis. It is that loss which is so painful for local communities. People struggle, sometimes for years, to persuade landowners to make the land available, to get the planning organised, to bring these schemes together, to defeat opposition—because there is always some—and to get these homes built. Now we fear they are to be told that, after three years, the occupiers will be able to buy those homes with a large discount—bless them, I would not blame them at all for taking advantage of this. Those homes will then not be available in perpetuity, as often was promised to the landowners and the council, for those people who will need those affordable homes in future. I hope that the Minister is listening. I know that he is incredibly sympathetic to these issues and understands them deeply. I hope that he will prevail upon some of his colleagues to step back from the brink on this one.