How can we deliver the affordable housing communities need for a healthy, thriving countryside?

Roger Mortlock will be joining us at Progressive Britain Conference 2024 at our panel ‘How to deliver the housing we need while protecting the countryside?’, which is supported by CPRE. Get your tickets to hear more from him there! 

A healthy home is the foundation for a decent life, but our broken housing system is failing to deliver the affordable homes that people need. In the countryside the housing crisis is being driven by high house prices, stagnating wages and a proliferation of second homes and short-term lets. This crisis is tearing the soul out of rural communities.

If you close your eyes for a moment and picture the countryside. What do you see? Green rolling fields perhaps, or deep forests and deserted unspoilt beaches. But just as it isn’t just the buildings and busy streets that make our towns and cities exciting, neither is a countryside stripped of its people a vibrant or sustainable place to live, work or go to school. While locals and visitors alike need shops, cafes and hospitals, we all rely on rural parts of the country to produce much of the food we eat. Bit by bit, however, an acute crisis of housing affordability is draining the countryside of the very people that make it tick.

While an affordable housing crisis is ripping through rural communities, we also face climate and nature crises, as well as a crisis in health and wellbeing. It is widely accepted now that the UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries in the word, with one in six species being threatened with extinction. Yet none of these crises exist in a vacuum. Promoting nature’s recovery is not an adversary to the housing affordability crisis, and climate mitigating strategies can create great places which boost wellbeing. We are asking the countryside to work harder than ever, but we believe that we need to tackle these challenges in a joined-up way. The countryside, and land in the Green Belt, is the key to solving them.

Green Belt is the countryside next door for 30 million people living in our largest towns and cities

There is a lot of rhetoric about our Green Belt protecting ‘grey belt’ land full of car parks and petrol stations. Green Belt land is the countryside surrounding 16 of the largest urban areas of England – it is ancient woodland, it is nature reserves, it is valuable habitat to our remaining wildlife, it is productive farmland, and it is the countryside next door to 30 million people. We need this land to help us reverse our declining biodiversity, store carbon, produce food and allow people to access our remaining wild spaces. It encourages compact, sustainable cities.

The Green Belt can and should deliver more – for people, climate and nature. CPRE in Greater Manchester have been instrumental in creating the Greater Manchester Ringway, a 300km walkable circuit in the Manchester Green Belt, connecting people to the countryside on their doorstep. Likewise, in CPRE London, the London Tree Ring makes the case for surrounding our capital with circles of woodland. Today’s ugly, disused scrubland could be the wetlands, forests or market gardens of the future.

Brownfield land within the Green Belt that has already been built on, should absolutely be considered for affordable homes. But there is a need to prioritise inner-city brownfield land for urban densification and regeneration of our sprawling, car-dependent commuter towns.

Labour have recently announced a brownfield-first strategy, which we were very pleased to see. CPRE research has shown that there are enough ‘shovel-ready’ brownfield sites in the UK for 1.2 million new homes, which will make a significant contribution to Labour’s goal of 1.5 million homes. Faced with the chance to deliver new sustainable and affordable homes in the places people want to live, why target valuable Green Belt land with poor access to infrastructure and local services?

We found that only 5% of housing built on Green Belt land was social housing

To deliver the housing the country needs, we will have to ensure that it meets local need for it to be supported by its community. And to increase local support, we first must recognise that there is a big discrepancy between what big developers are promising and what they are delivering.

Building in the Green Belt has time and time again shown to under-deliver on affordable housing. In our 2023 analysis, we found that only 5% of housing built on Green Belt land was social housing. When building on green fields is the only option, the next government must ensure that the new supply of housing meets local need, is affordable and delivers a new wave of social homes. New housing should be planned strategically, so there are good links to public transport, walking and cycling as well as proper provision of schools and healthcare.

CPRE has undertaken new polling that shows a clear pattern of conditional support for more housing in their local area – local support for new housing increased from 50% to 71% if it was built on brownfield land, and opposition decreased by half if they were locally affordable.

We need to ensure local people are not being priced out

Rural communities up and down the country are in dire need of much more genuinely affordable housing and for their valuable green spaces to be protected. If we are to realistically deliver the amount of housing that is needed, it has to be suitable for local communities and ensure local people are not being priced out.

When it comes to bringing house prices and rentals down, there is a common misunderstanding that increasing housing supply will automatically decrease the cost of housing. The housing market is, in fact, much more complex than that.

New research by the Social Market Foundation has not only supported the notion that more supply did not result in lower housing cost, but found that increasing supply in houses was often accompanied with price increases. Seattle is an example of a city which saw a significant increase in house prices after planning reforms increased supply. To compound this, these increased prices often increased the risk of gentrification in the area due to an increase likelihood of speculation. By contrast, policy reform in Minneapolis was a great example which demonstrates policies are needed to drive prices down: affordable rental requirements and strict definitions of affordability.

So-called ‘affordable’ homes are usually anything but

Housebuilders are often required to ensure new developments contain a proportion of ‘affordable’ homes, with their prices capped at 80% of market value. The average price of a house is now more than £420,000 according to data from the Land Registry, an increase of almost a third since 2017. So-called ‘affordable’ homes are often anything but. That’s why we’re calling for affordable housing to be redefined so that monthly housing costs are capped at 35% of average local incomes. We also need the next government to move away from generic targets and set targets specifically for social and affordable homes. The market will not address this problem on its own – we need direct government action to ensure real change comes soon.

Of course, the toxic mix of soaring house prices, sky-high rents, stagnating wages and huge waiting lists for social housing is familiar in urban areas too. Other factors, including the proliferation of second homes and short-term lets, have a particularly pernicious impact in rural areas. In Cornwall, where more than 15,000 families are on social housing waiting lists, the number of properties for short-term lets grew by 661% in the five years to 2021.

The solutions are there, what’s missing is the political will to implement them

But to fix the affordable housing crisis we also need to fix the market. As the Competition and Markets Authority have recognised, currently we are over-reliant on a market which is increasingly dominated by a small number of large, speculative developers. If we are to meaningfully solve the affordability crisis, we must diversify the market. The future of the housing market should include self-builders, councils, housing associations, community builders, SME builders, community land trusts, development corporations and co-operatives. A mixture of builders and business models will help deliver a range of housing types and importantly, deliver growth in the right places.

Debate over the housing affordability crisis has raged for so long that it can be easy to lose hope and consign it to the pile of unsolvable problems. However, that would be to deny yet more people their human right to a secure and decent home. The solutions are there, what’s missing is the political will to implement them. The next government must take note: urgent change is required to stop people being driven out of the rural areas they know and love. Without them, the countryside will cease to be the living, vibrant place that so many of us treasure, whether or not we live there ourselves.

Roger Mortlock will be joining us at Progressive Britain Conference 2024 at our panel ‘How to deliver the housing we need while protecting the countryside?’, which is supported by CPRE. Get your tickets to hear more from him there! 

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