Landowners Ready To Help Provide Affordable Housing
11/11/05

Landowners in Wales are ready and willing to help address the rural housing crisis, but they do need a financial incentive. CLA Wales has called on the Welsh Assembly Government to introduce a new housing policy involving 'exception sites' to encourage landowners to release land for sustainable affordable housing in the Welsh countryside.

Responding to the WAG consultation document on planning and affordable housing, CLA Wales Chairman Ross Murray said he was confident that many rural landowners would be willing to provide land. They genuinely wanted to help sustain the local community or to provide accommodation for both active and retired employees, but there had to be some element of recompense.

"We believe that a new policy tailored for the particular circumstances of rural Wales, involving an incentive by an element of open market housing is, on all the evidence, a compelling argument", he added. "We suggest that planning consent for a single open market dwelling could be an appropriate incentive for subsidised provision of, say, land for two affordable dwellings.

"Any public concerns of profiteering needs to be balanced by the fact that landowners would have to pay Capital Gains Tax ( i.e add to the public purse) on any land value gains. And the local community would benefit long term from capital being ploughed back into rural businesses.

"We're urging the Welsh Assembly Government to adopt a distinctive policy, introducing a spark of innovation, to ensure there is an adequate supply of affordable housing for local workers. An imaginative policy on Rural Affordable Housing and Exception Sites is needed if balanced local communities and their sense of place are to survive.

"It would make a significant difference, since evidence suggests that as much as 40% of the cost of an affordable home lies in the land. And in the National Parks this can be even higher".

Mr Murray added that it was clear that current policies weren't working. There were no national figures available for Wales, but in Powys 10% of the council's annual housing grant would be needed simply to replace the 249 houses sold in 2003-4 under 'right to buy'.

The fragile economy of rural Wales was under threat due to external economic pressures. One such was the demand for houses in the countryside as a lifestyle purchase where new buyers had little interest in the land.

He said there were enough constraints to ensure that the scale of exceptions sites in the countryside was very small. Only incremental growth of communities could take place, thanks to for example the Wales Spatial Plan which promotes socio-economic hubs in market towns as well as the general sustainability argument for concentrating development in larger settlements.

Concern that exception sites policies would undermine wider planning policy was also overplayed. It would be for Local Planning Authorities to carefully control and justify their development against criteria-based policies.

And while the way forward must be through Local Housing Partnerships as described in the WAG's Local Housing Assessment Guide, landowners should be part of the core membership. The current multi-disciplinary team set up to oversee preparation of the local housing assessment noticeably omitted the very people most able to make the vital difference.

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