Housing

Lord Bishop of Gloucester Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Gloucester]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, for initiating this debate. The issue of affordable housing, especially for the young, is of course a nationwide problem, but I see it particularly acutely in the county of Gloucestershire, where I live and work, and more especially in the Cotswolds. If I may, I shall share something of what I see.

The average Gloucestershire house price, at £197,000, is approximately eight times the estimated annual median gross household income of £23,000 and approximately six times the estimated average income for households containing at least one employed person. The affordability gap between local incomes and house prices is such that many households with housing need are unable to purchase a property on the open market without assistance, which has an impact on the demand for affordable, social, rented housing. That is reflected in the housing needs assessment, which estimates that the shortfall in affordable housing supply is 3,699 dwellings per annum across the county of Gloucestershire.

I give one example of how the need is being met in my own county, because it is a good story. Sixteen new affordable homes in the little town of Stonehouse were completed earlier this year, replacing eight old-fashioned hard-to-heat concrete council homes. Much of the building work for these innovative green homes took place offsite, allowing them to be built 60 per cent faster than traditional building techniques allow and incorporating solar hot water heating and rainwater recycling to ensure that they remain affordable for tenants to run. The Stonehouse development has now been shortlisted for the sustainable housing awards.

The lack of affordable housing is a difficulty and a good deal more than a difficulty, as we have heard, for individuals and families, especially for those looking for their own housing for the first time. There are personal and social consequences for those who cannot find a house that they can afford to buy, rent or even to maintain, but my concern is as great for the effect on whole communities, especially village communities, of the level of house prices that is making such communities places where only the affluent may live. On the whole, that excludes young families and forces those young families away from the village, not only to the village’s detriment but to the detriment of the families themselves, removed from the support of the wider family and the community where they have had their own sense of value and worth.

In the setting of the Cotswolds, to the need for affluence is added the problem that many of the affluent arrive in the village only at the weekend from their London homes—there might even be one or two in that category among the membership of your Lordships’ House. We end up dealing with ghost villages and the collapse of natural community to a worrying degree. This imbalance towards the older age range makes these villages potentially unsustainable in the medium and long term.

Rural housing enablers who work through community councils or local authorities have a significant track record of facilitating the provision of affordable housing in rural communities, using community-led planning. However, the funding of rural housing enablers is not always secure in either the short or longer term. There must be a much more creative approach in partnership working to deliver affordable housing.

One such approach is represented by a resource called Faith in Affordable Housing. It explores mechanisms for the release of church land and property for affordable housing, both urban and rural. Published in February this year, it is a fully downloadable resource that provides practical information and technical detail for housing professionals, planners and property specialists. It covers the rules and requirements of almost all the main Christian denominations in England and Wales, and contains case studies on how to maximise the provision of housing and facilities through the creative use of property.

Faith in Affordable Housing has been developed by a partnership including Housing Justice, the University of Gloucestershire—of which I am pro-chancellor—and the Church of England. As part of this project, we were able to obtain confirmation from the Charity Commission that land and property could be released at below full market value because the provision of affordable housing would count as part of “charitable objectives” for a Christian church. It is important for the Government to acknowledge that churches have an important role in the partnerships needed to deliver affordable housing, particularly in rural areas, and to help to facilitate these partnerships by ensuring that funding is sustained, even in these hard-pressed times, for rural housing enablers.

Social cohesion becomes all the more important in times of economic hardship. Affordable housing is crucial for that cohesion and the flourishing of community. I urge the Government not to allow financial stringency to make a critical situation worse.