Social Housing: South Cotswolds

Debate between Matt Rodda and Roz Savage

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Savage]

I agree with the hon. Member about the financial impacts and even more so the social impacts of young people not being able to afford their first home and fly the nest of their parents. It is having a catastrophic impact on young people.

Returning to the South Cotswolds, around 80% of Cotswold district lies within a designated national landscape—the Cotswolds area of outstanding national beauty—and of the remaining 20%, roughly half is flood plain.

[Matt Rodda (Reading Central) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech and highlights perfectly the pressure on the landscape in southern England. Does she agree that there is a great deal of scope in many towns and even some larger villages for building on brownfield land? In Reading there are a number of examples of this, and I am sure colleagues have examples from their own areas. Brownfield could provide a very valuable resource to help protect the countryside.

[Dr Savage]

I could not agree more that we should be prioritising brownfield sites as well as refurbishing existing housing. We could very nearly, if not completely, meet the housing target through those means without needing to take space away from nature or food production.

Imposing a target of over 1,000 homes a year in the Cotswold district may make a good headline, but in practice it encourages speculative development on greenfield sites, where services are often poor and flood risk high, rather than genuinely affordable homes for local people in more appropriate locations. But I want to be clear that the debate is not about opposing new housing; it is about ensuring that what we build reflects local need, protects our environment and natural heritage and strengthens our rural communities rather than undermining them.

Our infrastructure is already stretched thin. Many of our villages have limited public transport, ageing drainage systems and GP surgeries that are full to capacity. Broadband and mobile coverage remain unreliable in too many places, and with climate change flood risk is rising with every winter storm. We simply cannot add hundreds of new homes without first ensuring that the essential services of water, drainage, transport and healthcare can cope. Our infrastructure is fragile. Growth must be planned sensibly, sympathetically and in a logical order according to local constraints, not imposed from the top down and literally bulldozed through.

These homes must also be genuinely affordable. Over the years, many local authority homes have been transferred to housing associations under large-scale voluntary transfer. In North Wiltshire, that happened back in 1995. Those homes now belong legally to the housing associations, not to the council, but too many of those housing associations are now selling off rural homes rather than refurbishing and retaining them. In some villages, every remaining affordable home could be lost. Once they are sold into the private market, they are gone forever—they will never again be available at social rents. That result is devastating for rural communities. Young people who grew up in these villages find they can no longer afford to live in them. Teachers, carers and nurses are priced out, and older residents find nowhere to go when they want to downsize. If we want our villages to remain vibrant, living communities and not just be picture postcard backdrops, we must ensure that people of all incomes can afford to live and work in them.

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[Dr Savage]

That seems like an eminently sensible plan that I wholeheartedly endorse.

Coming back to genuinely affordable housing across the South Cotswolds, there is a planning tool designed for exactly that purpose. Rural exception sites are small parcels of land on the edge of villages, released specifically for affordable housing for people with a strong local connection. They are protected by legal agreements so that the homes remain affordable in perpetuity. When properly supported and implemented, rural exception sites can deliver well-designed homes that keep communities alive. Alongside that, we also need to see community-led housing playing a bigger role, with schemes initiated and owned by local people, often through community land trusts. Such schemes build not just houses but communities.

The affordable homes programme, which is the Government’s main grant scheme for affordable housing, has real potential to help, but it too often works for large urban developments rather than smaller rural ones. It is an urban tool being implemented in a rural setting. It can provide vital funding for social rent and community-led schemes, yet the rules and deadlines are often too rigid for parish-level projects. I therefore urge the Minister to make the programme more flexible and to strengthen the rural uplift, so that building a dozen good-quality, energy-efficient homes in a Cotswold village is just as viable as building hundreds on the edge of a city.

I am inspired by the tradition of alms houses, which is one of Britain’s oldest and most dignified forms of social housing. I was encouraged to see an architecture award recently given to some alms houses in London that show how modern design can honour that alms house heritage: small, beautiful, and community-oriented, with shared gardens and growing spaces. I can just imagine developments in our market towns and villages similar to those we already have in Cirencester, although those are many hundreds of years old.

[Matt Rodda]

Does the hon. Lady have anything she wants to say about the value of good design principles and linking to the existing traditional architecture in specific communities? We have had a great deal of success in our community in preserving the historical brickwork of Reading and encouraging new developments to copy that style, colour and range of bricks. I see that the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon) is nodding. He has the same local architecture with the same wonderful array of bricks and sometimes use of flints as well. Would the hon. Lady like to see that highlighted and encouraged?

[Dr Savage]

This is what we all want to see. Modern housing can be beautiful and blend almost seamlessly with existing housing stock in a way that is pleasing to the eye. It also helps communities to meld together when housing melds together. There are many villages in my constituency, and obviously the Cotswolds are associated with beautiful architecture in that lovely, honey-coloured Cotswold stone. Where the development is sympathetic, it is welcome, but there are other places where it is has been less sympathetic, and that tends to have an impact on the relationship between the residents in the old village and those in the new development—so yes, I wholeheartedly encourage and endorse the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion.

I can imagine developments like almshouses in our market towns and villages: clusters of low-energy homes built with local materials and ideally by local building firms, surrounded by shared green space for fruit and vegetables. That is how we build not only homes but communities. To make this happen, planning policy must reward quality and community value, not just sheer quantity. Rural exception sites need to be protected and strengthened, and national targets must recognise environmental constraints. We cannot meet housing numbers by paving over flood plains and protected landscapes.

Public bodies should be required to release small sites near services and bus routes at fair value for social housing, for convenience. Councils must also be able to retain 100% of right-to-buy receipts, with longer timelines, so that they are able to replace lost homes on a like-for-like basis. We must also address the pressure from short-term lets and second homes. A distinct planning use class for short-term lets, coupled with local powers to limit numbers and apply fair premiums, would help to ensure that homes remain homes, not vehicles for investment. This would help to keep our villages alive. So many of them are being hollowed out, with half or more of the homes empty for much of the week, meaning that local pubs, shops and schools really struggle to remain viable.

Finally, I ask the Minister to consider, please, a South Cotswolds pilot, bringing together Homes England, local councils and housing associations to plan small-scale, sustainable, community-oriented social housing. This would showcase what can be achieved when we design for place, people and planet, not for spreadsheets. Social housing is not a statistic; it is a lifeline. It keeps the nurse in Tetbury, the teaching assistant in Fairford and the young electrician in Cirencester living in the communities they serve. It keeps our schools open, our shops busy and our bus routes viable. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and to working with her to ensure that every community in the South Cotswolds has the affordable, safe and sustainable homes it needs.