General Discussion
South Downs Road
There was an interesting letter about housing need and housing development in the Dawlish Gazette a few weeks back. In case you missed it, here it is.
"State funding not forthcoming for affordable housing
Wednesday, 19 June 2013
Stephen Jope, of Elm Grove Road, Dawlish, writes:
The key to providing adequate quantities of social housing is to provide adequate state funding for the purpose. Unfortunately neither this government nor the previous one has been prepared to do so.
Consequently local authorities are forced to fall back on requiring developers, as a condition of planning approval, to include a percentage of affordable housing in their developments and to provide it at a reduced price. The trouble with that is that the percentages that can be included without the developments becoming unviable are invariably too low.
Based on figures in the November 2012 version of the Teignbridge Local Plan 19,840 new market homes would have to be built in the district for its affordable housing need to be met in full.
It is not clear that demand is high enough for anything like that figure to be achieved. That would in any case be a really gross overdevelopment.
True that in a district such as Teignbridge, lucky enough to have such assets, our high quality environment will attract a higher proportion than at present of second home owners and that that will increase the number of affordable homes to a small extent. However, I suspect that the current approach will lead to the worst of both worlds, a certain amount of overdevelopment plus a serious shortfall in social housing provision with hundreds if not thousands of local people (probably hundreds of thousands nationally) continuing to go without a home.
George Osborne has recently managed to find £12.5 billion of taxpayers’ money to fund a new mortgage scheme which has been criticised on the grounds, among others, that it will support house prices.
That money would be better spent on a programme of building affordable homes instead.
An additional source of funding if needed, one that could be used to fund affordable housing provision on an ongoing basis, might be to means test pensioners’ benefits. I hasten to add that I am a pensioner myself and therefore one of the people likely to be disadvantaged by such a measure, which I nevertheless feel would be justified if it would enable more affordable housing to be built.
I make no excuses for worrying that lax planning controls will allow development to occur in inappropriate developments. Given that a certain amount of development needs to take place surely we need more, not less, control to ensure the development is well planned and to minimise the impact on our countryside and landscapes.
Local authorities need to be empowered by giving them firstly enough money to meet their affordable housing needs (without being dependent on the building of unnecessarily large, and probably impossible to achieve, quantities of market housing) and secondly full control of planning matters.
Then, guided by local knowledge and sentiment, development could be optimally sited and integrated as harmoniously as possible within each locality and the quantity, types and mix of housing determined, as they should be, by demographic and social need, not by either arbitrary government diktat or market forces.
Trying to build more market housing than is either really needed or can be sold will not bring prices down, enable enough affordable housing to be built nor help the economy. Neither will any of those things be achieved by allowing development in all the wrong places."