LOCAL SOLUTIONS FOR LOCAL PROBLEMS

If ever you needed convincing that local problems are best tackled by local solutions, then this week’s report by the National Housing Federation to coincide with Rural Housing Week provides some graphic evidence.

Whilst house prices outside London have started to stabilise, the picture across the country is far from uniform.  What may surprise you is that the report found that outside the capital, it is in rural areas where affordability is the biggest issue –including most of rural Norfolk.

There are two factors at play here: the first is that rural incomes tend to be lower than those in urban areas, making the gap between incomes and house prices that much bigger.  But the real issue is one of supply; in the UK as a whole, we are simply not building enough new homes to keep up with the demand, which is being driven by an increasing population and a smaller average household size.

The Government’s response has been to encourage large-scale developments, mainly on the peripheries of our cities.  But this rather heavy-handed solution will simply exacerbate the gap between urban and rural areas. 

The fact is that to keep our villages and hamlets alive, we need to be increasing the supply of new homes in these very locations.  But the enormous developments so loved by national planners and big, corporate house builders are not necessarily the complete answer.  Understandably, rural residents want to maintain the character of the countryside, and swamping villages with hundreds of new homes, or thousands of new homes around market towns, will always meet resistance.

The people who object to such big developments are often labelled ‘NIMBYs’; I think that is unfair.  Most local residents that I talk to in the places we are building new homes understand that there is a need for a supply of homes to give younger people in particular somewhere to live, so that they can continue to live and work locally and keep the community alive.

It is not new homes per se that people object to; it is the scale of the development.  In general, building tens (rather than hundreds or thousands) of new homes will be welcomed.  Unfortunately, for too many national house builders, the easiest way to meet their target turnover is to develop sites on a massive scale thereby changing the character of the area.

This is where the local solution comes in.  Those of us who are building new homes in the communities in which we actually live and work are in a much better position to understand and respond to the needs of those communities.  We can bring forward new homes schemes which are appropriate, in scale and design.

The NHF report shows beyond doubt that we must increase the supply of new homes in our rural communities.  It is how we achieve that which is important, and finding a Norfolk-based solution to a particular Norfolk problem seems an obvious answer.