Housing: Affordability

Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ripon and Leeds]

My Lords, I, too, am deeply grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, for enabling us to tackle again the issue of the serious lack of affordable housing. I want particularly to concentrate on rural housing. The statistics abound—from a need for 11,000 new rural houses a year to the provision of just over 1,000 such houses by registered providers in 2011-12. The one thing on which there seems to be agreement is that there need to be far more than are currently being built.

I welcome the way in which the noble Baroness has stressed actual supply rather than wishful thinking. We need rural housing delivery strategies even more than housing needs strategies. We may be talking about small absolute numbers in terms of rural housing but they are key to the life of our rural communities in this country.

Faith in Affordable Housing is a churches’ project designed to help to release church land and property for affordable housing. It has worked particularly with the diocese of Gloucester to provide, for example, flats for young homeless people on a derelict vicarage site. It has had modest success but is having difficulty in finding partners for more challenging developments. Some of the earlier, very positive uses of church buildings and properties appear to be impossible for registered providers to contemplate today, and this seems an immense waste.

Churches are not the only organisations with underutilised land and property which could be released for affordable housing. However, in the case of churches, such developments can also provide new meeting places, worship areas and places which can be developed for community use and needs. Faith in Affordable Housing is seeking to raise the vision of churches to make such provision, but time and again it appears to be too complex for local authorities and registered providers to become partners and supporters in this enterprise.

Can the Government tell us how they will support rural communities, including churches, in imaginative plans to increase the supply of rural affordable housing through greater encouragement and through a more equitable financial provision?