PROVISION OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING & WHY COMMUNITIES NEED TO TA

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PROVISION OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING & WHY COMMUNITIES NEED TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT.

BY CLLR RICHARD SHEPHERD

1. Acquiring land and developing it for community housing has become necessary as government incorporates affordable housing into general social housing provision.
That is being done through Affordable Housing Delivery Statements (AHDS) which decree 2 that affordable housing and social housing are one and the same thing. And through government policy which influences the emerging Local Development Plans (LDPs) to remove the distinction.

2. However social housing and affordable housing serve very different purposes; like oil and water they cannot be mixed. This note explains the threat to rural communities which this government’s policy poses, and suggests an alternative strategy to bypass government entirely.

SOCIAL HOUSING

3. Under various housing acts, social (or council) housing for the homeless in their area has been a statutory duty of all local authorities for many years. Social housing can only be rented, and is allocated to the homeless on the points system. A points system governs the allocation of all social housing, so units are allocated to people on a housing list according to the number of points they score on a gold, silver and bronze priority system. Thus anyone can move into Pembrokeshire, declare themselves homeless and legislation demands that the local authority must house them.

4. Being “a local person” does not count at all on the points system; indeed local people are largely ignored in social housing, and there are many examples of local people, who are on the housing list, being passed over in favour of homeless problem families from outside the County. Moreover, as social housing is being built and operated by housing associations and other “registered social landlords” with the aid of government grants, govt can, and does, dictate lettings policy. In Pembrokeshire the Choice-Homes consortium looks after all social housing, and (for the present) affordable housing.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING

5. Affordable housing evolved in the 1980s, in the wake of “Right to buy”, as government policy to house key workers in a local community, just as agricultural dwellings are provided for farm or forestry workers, whose wages are insufficient to buy homes on the open market. Without such exceptions to normal development policy, farms would be without workers, as would communities. Planning permissions for agricultural dwellings therefore have conditions limiting their occupancy to people employed in agriculture. As a rough guide agricultural and affordable dwellings are valued at about 40% of their value without such an occupancy condition.

6. So it is that affordable housing is intended to meet local needs for cheap housing to rent or purchase by members of a community. It is not intended to be general social housing at all; social housing serves a quite different need. The first development plans in Pembrokeshire which were adopted in the late 1990s all had such affordable housing policies; these were carried over and extended in the Joint Unitary Develop-ment Plan adopted in 2006. Policy 50 (Affordable Housing) describes what such housing is, and how need is to be determined. JUDP Policy 51 allows for affordable housing to be built on “exception sites” i.e. land adjoining but strictly outside settlement boundaries. Because such land cannot ordinarily be developed for housing, it is far cheaper than land within a settlement, which contributes to the low cost of affordable housing on such sites. Many Welsh counties, notably Powys, have developed exception sites for local people for self-build projects, but Pembrokeshire has done very little in this way to help communities.

THE PROBLEM

7. As government runs out of money, and the funding of social housing is increasingly in doubt, someone had the wheeze of lumping social and affordable housing together, and making developers pay for both. Of course a policy of “soak the developer” is bound to fail in the end, as many developers simply bide their time rather than just give away up to half their land as present government policy indicates. This is already being seen in significantly reduced house building in our County.

8. Government has the whip hand as it controls grant to building associations for both types of housing, and can dictate letting policy to house anyone in need. The fact that lettings policy for general social housing is legally at odds with local occupancy of affordable housing in development plan policies seems to have occurred to no-one.

9. To make matters worse, the Govt prevents local planning authorities from attaching local occupancy conditions to permissions for affordable housing, so although such housing is supposed to be exclusively for local people, in practice it is denied them.
Undeterred, government is seeking to further accelerate the merger of two quite distinct types of housing by obliging Welsh counties to sign up to an Affordable Housing Delivery Statement (AHDS), which ignores the local needs policy in the JUDP. The AHDS proposes flat rate “affordable housing” provision in all developments, regardless of local need. The government intention is to allocate such housing in small increments in settlements to the very large number of homeless people wherever they come from.

THE EFFECT

10. Small increments in social housing are less noticeable in their impact on communities, but the cumulative effects of several social housing schemes on communities are more



insidious. There is a policy to protect Welsh speaking communities in the JUDP, but this is being watered down in LDPs in order to fend off these objections. Indeed the threat to the integrity and social inclusion of Welsh rural communities is immense. The Welsh Language is likely to be an early casualty of the in-migration which this government plans. Little consideration is being given to the added pressure on local services, schools and policing or the ability of small communities to absorb new people. No consideration at all is being given to the need to provide low cost housing, through rental or self-build, for local people working in a community.

11. The final nail in the coffin of affordable housing may be the emerging Local Development Plans (LDPs), which government is determined shall remove all references to local needs. Already the National Park LDP has completed its deposit stage, and the signs of things to come are clearly in LDP policy 33 (Affordable Housing), to which an objection on PALC’s behalf has been made. Indeed the policy states; “To deliver affordable housing as part of the overall housing provision”. We all know how dutiful the National Park is to government. PCC is more independent but it is likely that the PCC LDP will bow to pressure and a similar policy. So the only way in the immediate future by which a community will be able to secure affordable housing for its local people is by community ownership of affordable housing, through an extension of present development trust arrangements, known collectively as community land trusts.

CAN ANYTHING BE DONE ?

12. There is likely to be little stomach amongst unitary authorities for a direct challenge to government policy. Threats to withhold funding would undoubtedly be made and of course principal local authorities must have regard to their whole constituencies. On the other hand some local authorities are supporting community initiatives to find their own solutions. Cornwall has already established what are called community land trusts to do this, and we look briefly at this below.

13. Pembrokeshire communities are large in number (80) but many are too small, with limited resources, to do much themselves towards developing and operating community housing. As their main representative body, PALC can do much, with PCC support, to establish a single county-wide charitable trust to be responsible for the development of affordable housing in communities.

COMMUNITY LAND TRUSTS

14. A community land trust is a discretionary charitable trust which would own the land of affordable housing on behalf of the community. As local authorities in their own right town & community councils already have powers to buy and sell land or buildings.
These powers are commonly used to buy land for e.g. sports fields, amenity areas, cemeteries etc. The use of such a trust as a collective investment scheme is authorized for local authorities under s11 of the Trustee Investments Act, 1961.

15. How this could work in practice will be the subject of a Planning Law & Practice Note in the Members’ section of this web-site.

31 August 2009