How the housing strategy can help fix the rural housing crisis
At CPRE, as part of our ongoing campaigning for better development in rural areas, we have worked with leading researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) to help inform what we’d like to see in the government’s new housing strategy expected later this year.
I was very honoured to have the opportunity to present the key findings with the researchers at last September’s UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference in Belfast.
I talked about the clear and urgent need for more affordable homes, and particularly social rented homes (the lowest cost housing for renters) in rural areas. And I highlighted the key findings in our State of Rural Affordable Housing report:
- Rural areas are mostly getting market homes at insufficient discounts, not the genuinely affordable homes they urgently need. Rural social-rented housing delivery has plummeted with just 348 homes delivered in 2020/21 and 3,282 delivered in 2021/22, while ‘affordable’ housing delivery has increased with 21,826 affordable homes delivered in 2020/21 and 25,294 delivered in 2021/22.
- Rural social housing waiting lists have risen since 2020/21 in all but two regions in England.
- It would take 89 years to clear the social housing waiting list under the current build rate.
- Rural homelessness has increased by 40% since 2018/19.
Rural communities face an unprecedented housing emergency. We believe that everyone has the right to a decent, affordable home, and to live close to where they grew up or work. If we want to breathe new life into rural communities, rather than hollow them out, let’s build more genuinely affordable homes that are community-minded, smart and sustainable in design.
The reality: unaffordable for many
So will the much-trumpeted changes to planning policy deliver more genuinely affordable homes in rural areas? I’m not so sure.
Our latest research from UWE Bristol looked at all 84 local authorities classed as rural or predominantly rural in government statistics. The picture shows that social housing in rural areas will stay very low unless the government urgently changes national planning policy.
Here are the key findings:
- Most new housing being built in rural England does not meet the identified need for affordable housing, with only 14% specifically social housing (and a further 17% other housing types such as ‘affordable rent’).
- Since 2020, only half of rural councils have done a housing needs assessment. Such assessments are needed when a local council wants to update or revise policy in its local plan, and especially when the council wants to set a stronger requirement for affordable housing. In many areas, the data is missing or out of date. Even where need is identified, local policies and planning decisions often reduce the amount of genuinely affordable housing that gets built. As a result, the real need, as shown in local waiting lists, is often not met when new homes are built.
- In almost half or all (46%) of cases, plans often result in a postcode lottery with some areas expected to include affordable housing, while others are not. Sometimes this is based on local property values or sustainability, but in many cases, no clear reason is given.
- Only 21% of rural local authorities use the powers available to them to require affordable housing on the smallest sites, and only 20% of rural local authorities seek to provide any social housing at all through their planning policies.
Why supply alone fails
Overall, the findings of the report show that very few of the homes being built today are affordable to rural people in need; or on average or below average wages.
That’s because government housing policy is guided by the mistaken assumption that granting more planning permissions for housing, regardless of the type of housing, will bring prices down and make houses more affordable. That’s just not how the housing market works.
Clearly the ‘new standard method’ for setting housing targets won’t deliver the homes rural communities need. It uses an algorithm based on an ‘affordability multiplier’, which pushes targets up in more desirable areas. The research found that, across all the rural authorities surveyed, there would be an increase in housebuilding targets of just over half (55.82%). In practice, this leads to higher numbers but not the right types of homes: most new builds are still larger, high-priced properties designed to meet housebuilders’ profit margins.
A chance to get it right
With a further revision to national planning policy (the NPPF) and a new housing strategy due later this year, the government has a crucial chance to put past policy mistakes right. It can get back on track by setting national targets for social housing, backed by planning policies that require every local authority — and every large development — to play its part. Done well, this strategy could start to fix the rural housing crisis. To make the most of this opportunity, we’ll be using the current consultation on the new NPPF to call for:
- A focus on building the 145,000 affordable homes per year that were estimated as needed by Crisis and the National Housing Federation in 2018.
- All local authorities completing a local assessment of need based on evidence such as the local housing waiting list. The draft new NPPF mentions this which is welcome, but we will also call for assessments to be done to a more consistent method and template.
- Specific policy priority given to meeting local needs in rural areas as distinct from market demand. And less weight given to meeting general targets generated by the ‘standard method’ or other algorithms. There is a welcome step in the new NPPF to widen the scope for affordable housing to be secured on small sites in more rural areas (with a wider definition of ‘designated rural areas’ for this purpose) than currently. But we are still concerned that the new policy will generate general housebuilding targets far higher than is necessary or achievable. This will continue to mean that planning decisions will continue to go the way of the big six builders, who largely do not provide new houses that are affordable to average earners in rural areas.
- A national decision-making or development management policy with minimum requirements for housing type and tenure diversity, resulting in more affordable homes, built more quickly, and meeting the specific need identified in the local assessment. The new NPPF puts greater general weight on providing more affordable housing, but there are likely to be problems if the policy doesn’t apply until plans are updated. We think there is a case for a default affordable housing expectation in all new developments, particularly while plans are being prepared, and we will develop this argument in our response.
