The Rural Housing Crisis: the problem and solutions

The need for housing is critical across the UK. Government and building officials agree that more housing needs to be built, and more quickly. The Government is trying to address the crisis through various schemes, intending to create an extra million homes by 2020. Yet Britain is proud of its countryside and green belt, and there are concerns that this could be lost in the drive to create properties. UKCO spoke to Crispin Truman, Chief Executive at the Campaign to Protect Rural England. about the problem and possible solutions which will protect our green spaces whilst housing our families.

In 1926, the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s (CPRE) first Honorary Secretary, Patrick Abercrombie, wrote that “it should be possible that a just balance be struck between conservation and development”. Good development, Abercrombie believed, could “bring forth something new but beautiful” in our villages and market towns and preserve the life of the countryside. And his vision of diverse and thriving rural communities is still ours today.

CPRE wants to see a countryside where land is used sustainably, in the public interest. Where new developments are integrated with good transport links that help to prevent loneliness and isolation. Where properly funded public services address the needs of school children, key workers, the elderly and those who are vulnerable. Where open, green space is recognised for its intrinsic value and contribution to health and wellbeing. Where development meets the needs of communities and no one is forced to leave their local area because they cannot find an affordable place to live.

We have been presented with a false trade-off between building homes and protecting the natural character and beauty of the countryside, when in fact we should seek to do both. To properly address the needs of rural communities, we do need more homes in rural areas, but they must be the kind of homes that people want and can afford to live in.

Housing is at the heart of our members’ concerns – ordinary people who care about their environment and community, and have no desire to see the countryside become a museum.

Affordable homes can help secure the future of our rural communities. Just a handful of new properties can make the difference between a primary school forced to close and one which goes on welcoming new pupils; a village shop shuttered up and one which continues to serve customers; a pub converted into holiday cottages and one which remains a hub for the local community.

Yet, across much of rural England, communities are being quietly eroded by an acute lack of low-cost rented homes. An analysis by the National Housing Federation last year found that 52 rural schools in England had closed since 2011, along with 81 rural post offices and over 1,300 pubs.

As rural housing practitioners have long highlighted, there are a number of key barriers to the delivery of affordable homes in rural areas. These include inflated land values, difficulties finding appropriate sites, the abandonment of a specific rural target for grant funding, and the Government’s decision to define ‘affordable rent’ as up to 80% of market rates, a level which is simply not affordable for many low-paid rural workers.

These are the real barriers. Not the democratic planning process, nor green belt protection. As the Local Government Association recently highlighted, councils and their communities granted nearly twice as many planning permissions as the number of new homes that were completed in the financial year 2016/17, approving more than 321,000 new homes of which only 183,000 were built.

If we want to deliver more homes more quickly, we must also stop conflating builders, who build the homes that people need to live in, with speculative developers whose only object is to profit from rising land prices. The Government should work to support builders, and be prepared to hold developers accountable.

But perhaps the most fundamental problem is that the realities of rural life are not well understood, in Westminster or by the general public. Too often, the housing crisis is portrayed as an exclusively urban issue. Rural poverty remains largely unacknowledged, even though low wages and high living costs mean there are pockets of real deprivation in the countryside. The fact that a single person on a median rural wage can expect to spend 46% of their income on rent gets lost in the focus on cities.

We need stronger measures to reconnect rural rents and incomes, encourage land to come forward more cheaply, and promote better rural-proofing of policy. In an age of declining faith in government, developers and the planning system to deliver the right homes in the right places, it is vital that communities are empowered to push for the kind of development they want and need.

CPRE believes that it is possible to build the homes that people need and preserve the green spaces they benefit from. We must protect the countryside and enhance it, by promoting the right kind of development in the places where it is needed most. Only by pursuing both these aims will we ensure that our villages and market towns remain vibrant and thriving places for future generations to live and work in.

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