1.
Introduction
1.1 The National Park Authority is
considering its response to representations received on the revision of the
Local Plan now on deposit. There have been objections from some Meavy residents
to the application to Meavy of the new “affordable housing” policies,
and the Parish Council has taken a position in support of those objections.
1.2 I understand the aspirations of the
Council and our residents, and will always listen carefully to their views and
support them where I can. I regret that in this particular matter I am unable to
do so, as I believe that their views are based on misunderstanding and on
misinformation, much of it provided by third parties.
2. Background
2.1 It has been generally agreed for many
years, and apart from Meavy it seems it still is agreed, that younger
people are no longer able to find houses in the villages where they were brought
up, because incomers from much wealthier areas bid up the price of houses, and
put them beyond the mortgage capacity of local people, who are dependent on
relatively poorly paid local jobs. Not only is this something of which many of
us have personal experience, but it is also a documented fact. The table on page
22 of the draft Local Plan like every similar table for a generation, shows that
compared to Devon as a whole we have a significant shortage of residents aged 16
to 29. That is, the age group which leaves school, gets married, and
needs to set up a home.
2.2 There has also been wide agreement
that something must be done about it. However we have had to wait for a better
understanding of our problems in Whitehall, and a good deal of educational work
on bureaucrats some of whom live a great deal closer than London! Like all
change in this country things have moved slowly, and it is only recently that we
have broken through the mentality that says that if you can’t compete in the
open market there must be something wrong with you. Affordable Housing policies
are the result.
3. What is affordable housing?
3.1 It is vital to understand that there are
three types of housing, and two of them are affordable, but only one has the
word affordable in its name.
Social housing is what we used to call
Council Houses, (for Council read “Registered Social Landlord”).
Open Market housing is for people who can
afford the mortgages to buy houses at the present price levels.
In between these two there are many people
who are too well off ever to qualify for a “Council House”, but not
well enough off ever to get a mortgage for even the cheapest open market
house. Although people talking about affordable housing often include Social
Housing as well, it is these “caught in the middle” people at whom
affordable housing is really aimed.
4. What makes housing affordable?
4.1 This is one of the questions about which
there is a lot of understandable confusion. We see a modest house in the
villages going for £300,000. How could that be made affordable to people
on local incomes? Well of course, because it is an open market house it can’t,
and the price of open market existing houses has nothing to do with affordable
housing. But it is equally obvious that the house wouldn’t cost £300,000 to
build, and if you were able to buy the land on which it stands at the price of
agricultural land and then build the house on it, it still wouldn’t cost
anything like £300,000. When a new house is built for the open market the
difference between what it costs to provide it (allowing for the builder’s
profit), and what the proud first owner will pay for it, is the
extra that well off outsiders are willing to pay to live in Meavy, and the
person who actually gets the money is the man who owned the land. Valuable
things planning permissions! They multiply the value of your land overnight by 5
times or more; or rather they do if your permission is to build open market
housing.
4.2 If you say to a developer “you can
have planning permission to build a house here, but only one that someone
earning local money can afford, and you can only sell it to someone local”,
what you are saying to him is that he cannot charge the people he sells the
house to the price which open market buyers would be willing to pay. There
are only two ways the developer can make the development work. He can make small
economies in the type of house he builds by removing features which a wealthy
incomer might insist on but a local person might be glad to do without if it
enabled him to buy a house locally, for example a second garage to put his boat
in! However the vast majority of the reduction in what he can sell for has to be
recovered by the developer offering less money to the landowner for the land.
4.3 Of course you can’t just say “make
it affordable”. You have to offer a formula, and the policy says 25% less
than the value. The developer therefore works backwards and says “if it
costs me £x to build this house, and when I have done so I will be allowed to
sell it for £y, how much can I afford to pay for the land and still make a
profit out of the deal? Whether the house gets built or not then depends on
whether the landowner cares to sell at that price, knowing that it is less than
he would get if there was permission for open market housing, - but also knowing
that he won’t get permission for open market housing.
4.4 Not only will the price of the land and
the build cost come down, but the overall market value will fall sharply,
because the affordable house comes with conditions which only allow it to be
sold to local people, not only when first built, but as long as the house is
there. That sharply reduces the market value of the house, - and contrary to
what some believe the Building Societies and other lenders now have enough
experience of the kind of hardworking young people who buy affordable houses to
be willing lenders. It is true that there will always be people on low single
incomes for whom no house can be made affordable, - which is what Social Housing
is for - but these policies will make house purchase an option for a significant
proportion of those now excluded from the housing market.
5. What do the new policies mean if we say
yes?
5.1 The new house has to fit into the policy
in the new draft Local Plan called HS1. There are six cases to choose from, but
only two of them would allow a new house in small villages like Meavy, unless
anyone can think of a derelict factory or a hotel just waiting to be turned into
flats. One case is that if you have a substandard house you can get permission
to pull it down and rebuild at the same size as the old one. This has
always been the case, and very few houses have been built under it.
5.3 The only case that matters is the one
numbered (vi) on page 25 of the draft plan. It says you can build new houses in
small gaps in existing built up frontages provided that they fit into their
surroundings, are of a kind that local people would want and not
“Executive” mansions, and that ALL of them are sold as
“affordable” houses to people who qualify as “local” and can
only be sold again later to people who also qualify as “local”.
Result:
NO MORE SPEC BUILDING IN
VILLAGES LIKE MEAVY.
5.4 Readers should now be able to
see that the people who have been going round frightening Meavy residents into
signing petitions by telling them that the new policies are an open door for the
developers to come in and bury Meavy in new houses have, to put it politely, got
it wrong.
6. How it works out in practice
6.1 Much of the opposition in
Meavy is based on a recent application for two houses on an “infill”
site. One distinguished resident actually publicly berated the hapless Dartmoor
National Park Authority for giving permission for them, clearly unaware that the
Authority has refused permission a total of four times, and is still refusing.
The only permission given was by a Government Inspector on appeal!
6.2 If the new policies had been
in force for this application the chances are that permission for only one house
would have been given, not the two the Inspector allowed. The National Park
would have been spared the (still continuing) struggle to make the developer
build something that reasonably fits into the village, as the new policy
requires him to do just that. And either way it would have been permission for
affordable houses which would inevitably have led to the simple cottages we all
wanted. The developer would then have had to decide whether to accept the
permission and the much reduced but still substantial profit it would allow
them, or not build the houses. Either way the community would win, - either
local people would get a chance to buy, or the site would not be used.
7. What happens if the answer is
“no”?
7.1 No new house could be built
in Meavy except for a tied agricultural home, or a replacement for an existing
house in poor condition. No means no, - it includes “no” to the
long-standing “exception” policy. Under that policy it has been
possible to build the equivalent of the old Council Houses on sites which wouldn’t
normally get planning permission.
7.2 There are undoubtedly residents who would
welcome it being made impossible to build a new house in Meavy; they either don’t
understand the consequences, or are taking a view which reflects their own
interests to the exclusion of those of many other people. During the last twenty
years I have seen Meavy lose its local character at an accelerating pace. I
reject a future for Meavy which consists simply of a dormitory for Plymouth
doctors and retirement homes for rich incomers, where local people cannot get a
foot in the door. I invite anyone who cares about the place to do the same.
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