Farming and Rural Communities

Lord Best Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, for initiating this timely debate and I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, who is such a champion for rural communities.

My comments address the impact of the Government’s economic and planning measures on the critical issue of housing in rural areas. I will draw on the work of the Devon Housing Commission, which I was delighted to chair and which reported last year.

The shortage of secure, decent, affordable homes is creating particularly acute difficulties for employers in the private and public sectors in rural communities. But rural areas have half as much social housing—from councils and housing associations—as elsewhere: only 9% of the stock, compared with 17% in the country as a whole.

The 25 to 35 year-olds are moving away from many rural areas, not just because they cannot compete with house purchasers moving from other places, but because private sector rents are beyond the reach of even those on average incomes. Without a workforce, local businesses and public services inevitably decline.

The Government are taking action in respect of some of the recommendations of the Devon Housing Commission, but really need to go further. First, the affordable housing programme needs adequate funding. The Government have found a very welcome extra £800 million, but their agency, Homes England, should recognise the special value of investment in rural areas: 10% of total grant funding should be earmarked for rural housing associations and local community land trusts.

Secondly, in rural areas, as elsewhere, the Government are tackling the delays and blockages caused by inadequate resources for planning departments. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill should speed up and increase delivery, and local government reorganisation should ease the pressures created by having a multiplicity of planning authorities in some rural areas. Devon, for instance, has 10 local authorities with planning responsibilities, which, in future, will be combined into unitary councils to streamline local processes.

Thirdly, there is the need to address the loss of properties available for long-term letting to local people in many rural tourist hotspots, caused by landlords switching to Airbnb-style short-term lets. The Government are committed to a registration scheme, and they have consulted on the creation of a new use class, which would require planning consent before tenancies can be converted to short-term lets. I have tabled an amendment to the Renters’ Rights Bill to move this forward.

Fourthly, as recommended by the Devon Housing Commission, Defra has announced further funding for rural housing enablers, which are hosted by rural community councils. These RHEs play a crucial role in brokering small village schemes with all the relevant parties—housing associations, planners, landowners, the parish council, et cetera. However, Defra’s commitment has been for only 12 months at a time, inhibiting recruitment of these enablers; a five-year programme would be much better.

Fifthly, there is the unique planning tool of rural exception sites, which enable planning consent to be granted for development exceptionally, precisely because the homes will serve local needs. These developments can produce delightful, affordable, sustainable homes for local people, replenishing the local primary school and rejuvenating the local community. It would be good to see the Chancellor encouraging landowners to make sites available for more of these village schemes through tax reforms, as advocated by the Country Land and Business Association.

In conclusion, both the building of new homes that are unaffordable to local households and the flipping of accommodation for rent to short-term lets and second homes risk rural communities becoming enclaves of older, more affluent owners. These trends are stifling economic growth, as well as eroding long-established rural communities. Can the Minister assure the House that the Government will support more of the excellent local social housing schemes, which can do so much to sustain and revitalise local economies and rural communities?

Trees: British Ash Tree

Lord Best Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Earl for initiating this debate. I declare my interest as a trustee of the Tree Council, a body that emerged from the disaster of Dutch elm disease, which destroyed between 25 million and 30 million elms. In 1973, National Tree Planting Year was launched—“Plant a Tree in 73”—with cross-party support in an effort to engage the public and repopulate the land with trees. On 1 January 1974, the Tree Council was formed to continue the encouragement of planting, care and conservation of trees and to act as a critical friend and adviser to Governments.

In 1979, After the Elm was published in collaboration with the Tree Council in an effort to identify and benefit from the lessons of Dutch elm disease. Its conclusions included that controls had worked most effectively when organisations worked together strategically on a regional basis rather than being locally organised; that the amount of funding dedicated to the fight had been inadequate; and that lay members of the public were crucial in the work to identify the spread of the disease.

In 1987, the great storm wiped out millions more trees, literally overnight. Just as the Tree Council was spawned from the Dutch elm disease response, the Tree Council’s volunteer tree warden scheme came into being as a direct result of that, a different sort of tragedy. Today, we have about 8,000 tree wardens, unsung heroes, across the UK, a wonderful example of the big society at work. The volunteer tree wardens work in their communities to educate, engage and enthuse people about trees, as well as taking practical steps to improve local environments. I pay tribute to them and to our director-general, Pauline Buchanan Black, and her team who support them. On 28 November, we will be celebrating this year’s National Tree Week and the contribution of tree wardens here, in your Lordships’ House, with the Minister from the other place, David Heath MP.

At this time of a new disaster for trees in this country, the Tree Council is ready and willing to help. We have been briefing all the networks of tree wardens on what to look out for and how to report it. They have been sending in vitally important reports to the Forestry Commission on suspected outbreaks of ash dieback. Too many plant diseases and pests have been introduced into or taken hold in this country over the past 10 years: sudden oak death, acute oak decline, oak processionary moth, Asian longhorn beetle, leaf miner and bleeding canker. Estimates suggest that there are at least 80 million ash trees across the UK. If the disease follows the same progress as in Denmark, we stand to lose around 90% of our ash trees over the next nine years. That is 72 million trees: a disaster on a scale up to three times worse than Dutch elm disease.

The important issue now is not to apportion blame but to take effective action to minimise the impact not just of this disease but of each of the threats to tree health that have found their way to these shores in the past decade. The Tree Council, its member organisations and thousands of volunteers will all play their part. However, it will also be important to revisit the lessons learnt from this and earlier experiences and to find ways of ensuring that they are retained in the collective memory and mainstreamed into action plans that will continue to be followed and updated regularly to protect our tree stock in the future. Trained volunteers will be critical to the success of any plan. The Tree Council’s tree wardens are already on the case but need to be integrated within long-term strategies. The scale of this threat must not be underestimated by the Government. Once again, we face landscape changes on an almost unimaginable scale. This is a time not for blame but, as in 1973, for collaboration and action. We must all do our utmost to prevent any similar disaster in the future.

Rural Communities: Prince’s Countryside Fund

Lord Best Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, for this wonderful opportunity to debate an important topic. I look forward to the maiden speeches, particularly from my noble friend Lady Eaton whose brilliant work in local government I am more than familiar with. With five minutes allotted, I will cut to the chase. My theme is the desperate need for affordable housing for local people in rural areas. Yes, the outlook for creating the necessary affordable housing appears bleak, but there are grounds for some realistic optimism.

I would identify the barriers to producing the affordable homes that are so badly needed in rural areas under four headings: first, fierce local opposition to development; secondly, restrictive planning requirements; thirdly, lack of funds to make homes affordable; and, fourthly, disproportionate costs and effort for organisations, particularly housing associations, to get involved. It is much easier to produce 60 apartments in an urban area than it is to build six homes in a village.

I believe that there are solutions to each of these problems and I shall take them in reverse order. First, rural housing enablers were invented by the Rural Development Commission in the 1990s with funding from the Housing Corporation after a report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. These individuals can really make things happen. They are the brokers, the go-betweens and the facilitators who work with the parish council, the land owners and the planners, and they bring in the housing association when all is sorted out. That prevents the need to go to endless meetings in the village hall—starting at six and finishing at midnight—night after night. The rural housing enabler does all that for you and housing associations can bring their skills in getting the homes built and meeting all the design criteria. At the end of the day, we need more of them, and they are very inexpensive when spread over a number of schemes.

Secondly, on funding, as part of the reform of the housing revenue account, with which the Government thank goodness are pressing forward, local authorities need to be entitled to retain all the proceeds from the sales under the right to buy of council housing, and the proceeds of any other sales of land or property, and recycle those proceeds into new homes. That does not add to the public sector debt. The Homes and Communities Agency, which will not have as much money in the future as it has had in the past, should still give some priority to rural housing in the grants that it gives out. But most important, the exception sites planning policy should be liberalised. This can represent the way to raise funds that make homes affordable without extra government grants.

Let me explain this in a little detail. If a couple of homes for outright sale are permitted in a place where planning consent would not normally be granted, the landowner can receive market price for the two houses that are sold—remember that market price may be £700,000 to £1 million an acre compared with an agricultural value of £5,000 to perhaps a maximum of £7,000 an acre—and then land for perhaps six homes for affordable housing in the form of rented or shared ownership can be provided without the land having to be paid for at all. The cross-subsidy does the trick and can make homes affordable for people in perpetuity.

The contentious issue is that of local opposition. It is one of the crucial reasons why development is currently being prevented in so many areas. People in the countryside often hate change. Sometimes they fear that young families will be bad neighbours, they do not want their view to be spoilt, and they believe that more homes may reduce house prices. Yet, as I know from many years of sometimes harrowing experience in getting new rural housing schemes going, after the new homes are built the fiercest former opponents are often the first to say how much better village life has become because of the young couples who have been able to bring up their families there.

I turn to how to change hearts and minds. The Government intend to introduce two new measures which I hope will make a difference. First, the new homes bonus will reward councils that are positive about new housebuilding, providing funds which will be denied to councils that block new housing. This should strengthen the hand of councillors who show the leadership to support new home building.

The second measure proposed by the Government is the community right to build programme, giving local communities the chance to give planning consent without any of the bureaucracy and delay that is built into the system so often today. Local housing trusts and/or local people working closely with existing housing associations, perhaps helped by a rural housing enabler, can pursue these schemes. But on how to decide whether the community really wants new homes or indeed even business premises, the Government’s first thoughts were for a 90 per cent yes vote in a referendum. The Housing Minister has subsequently softened this to a 75 per cent yes vote, but others have argued that this is still a huge hurdle when we know that it is very much easier to get a good turnout for a no than for a yes vote when the outcome is uncertain. Bodies such as the Rural Coalition, the CPRE and others have suggested instead that the planning authority should still be engaged in the process and, indeed, that if the parish council is on board, the scheme should proceed. It is well worth us all getting behind more rural housing, and there are other positive opportunities to get things done.