Housing: Affordable Housing

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

The noble Baroness makes an important distinction between affordable housing, which is a formal definition, and affordability, which is a separate matter. My simple answer to her question is that planning permission was granted for 216,000 new homes in England last year, so the planning reforms are working.

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, eight years ago the Affordable Rural Housing Commission estimated that we needed at least 11,000 affordable new homes every year in rural areas. We have scarcely ever managed more than a third of that number, and the proportion is falling. That means that those who need such homes in rural areas move to urban areas, adding to the numbers of the urban homeless and further obscuring the rural problem. What remedy does the Minister have for this state of affairs?