Briefing Notes for Candidates and Electors on Rural Housing Issues

i) What are the problems?

If we want to have viable rural communities they need a sound demographic spread. The outgoing youngsters and the incoming or remaining older ones will be the cause of an elderly community. National market forces mean that those who retire from high value property markets can down size and reap the benefits from the high value of the property they are selling. Young people starting out to make a home and raise a family will not be able to compete unless they can inherit a local property or have already established a means of high income. The only hope for buying a property depends on whether they can get a run down building or site and rebuild through their own resources. Those who have done this are fully aware of how lucky they have been.

The only way of stopping the imbalances of property values between, say London, and Herefordshire would be intervention through planning controls and regulating what properties can or cannot be available to outside purchasers. Add to this the increase of city bonuses and the differences in incomes and it is no wonder that some villages and even towns become deserts from September through to March as has happened in other parts of the country. If intervention occurs however local people who want to sell will be denied the opportunity to secure the best price under unrestricted market conditions. Intervention by national Government seems unlikely but it is the only way that market forces can be prevented from emptying the countryside of young people. In so doing government subsidy would be necessary to compensate present owners

The other problem is having something to make young people want to stay or settle. In France the process of ‘desertification’ has meant that more and more farms have been left to rot. The result, an influx of British ex-pats taking advantage of the much lower prices. This is not always popular with the French. The result? : a potential elderly British population in France.

The Consequences: A viable community depends on a range of ages so that various facilities can operate. An elderly populations will give employment to doctors, but the need for schools will fall. A house bound community will be dependent on others to deliver their supplies. Public transport is unlikely to be needed for older members of the community who cannot venture out, and not very convenient for those who would like to due to the difficulty of getting to a bus stop and so on.

Elderly residents may find it hard to shoulder the burdens of local civic duties, running a church or other social activities. Young people will look elsewhere to nearby towns for their entertainment and probably change to urban living where they have a better chance of earning a living and getting accommodation. Add to this the decline in agriculture and the ‘desertification’ process gains momentum.

Shops, Churches, Chapels, Pubs, Youth Clubs, Community Centres all need money and physical support from the local community if they are to survive.

ii) What could be done?

Schools need to be maintained as a reason for youngsters to find a way of staying or moving in. Although the bureaucrats will always tell you that a bigger better school many miles away will be much better, it rarely is, and the result of the closure of the village school is to rip the heart out of the community

If nothing is done to reduce the consequences of a free housing market by national government then local communities need to nurture the idea of cheaper housing through housing associations. Currently housing associations are being told by national government to reduce their rents in line with the fall in inflation, with the result that their building budgets will be reduced. Political pressure has to be brought to bear on national politics because there is little which can be done locally in this respect. The one thing which can be done is to try and establish the places where land might be available and where demand for the housing would fit in with employment and transport opportunities etc.

Council Housing may make a come back but this seems too far in the future to make a significant contribution to halting the drift away to the towns by the young and the creations of detached elderly communities.

Empty properties should be monitored so that the local authority should make use of its powers to discourage this wasteful use. 3% of the national housing stock remains empty for more than 6 months with 1.6% being from the private sector. 20% of the population live in rural areas. Government policy on their website.



This site gives a wealth of information regarding housing generally and how owners can be helped to bring their property back into the housing pool. Such properties should be identified and the Empty Homes Agency will try to involve housing associations and the local authority in returning such properties to the housing stock. Whilst rotting ruins may be seen as having some visual amenity there is a growing recognition that if the owners cannot make use of them as part of the housing stock, local authorities will have to intervene more.

Since 2006 local authorities may issue last resort enforcement orders under the Empty Dwelling Management Orders (EDMOs). For once there seem to be some intervention powers which could be used after a property has been empty for more than six months. In rural communities there are often properties which have been left empty for much longer. Rather than going on the open market perhaps the next stage is for local authorities to find ways to bring them into a social housing pool or to give assistance to local young people in financing their purchase. Is the return of the local authority mortgage well overdue?

The second homes problem should also be analysed and consideration be given to regulation but this is again a problem of national policy rather than local. It is also complicated by the restriction of choice that central intervention could bring about. The debate to date has been rather simplistic because the phrase in effect covers several categories.

Those who buy to let for the purposes solely of letting the property out as a holiday home on commercial terms should be discouraged in areas where there is a housing shortage. In some parts of the country where the local population has moved on the empty properties are at least used to contribute something to the economy for part of the year. Those who simply buy to let as all year round homes can bee seen as making a contribution to the local housing pool as long as rents and housing benefits are in a realistic ratio.

Second Homes in Transition could cover those properties where the owners have purchased a property with a view to retirement and may be taking advantage of the differences in national house values. Others may have purchased the property as their main residence as they are in tied accommodation and the ‘second home’ is their insurance or, as is more likely, their eventual residence on retirement. The same can apply to properties which have been inherited but the new owner has to seek their living elsewhere, pending retirement. In the meantime these properties are sometimes let out as holiday lettings while be the owner may visit for weekends or longer breaks in the winter months. Others may choose to keep the property unlet.

The Second Home as a bolt hole pure and simple is probably the least valuable to the local community in removing a potential home from the market. These maybe seen as the least complicated and where the property is isolated or without facilities may not be viable units in the housing stock. However, where they would be viable there is a case for intervening by way of legislation creating special planning permission and setting maximum quotas. If a perfectly sound starter home is going to be removed from the market for this purpose then present free market laws will not prevent it. Such a property might be an ex-council house situated in a viable community with a shop, pub and good communications.

Sometimes the owners of such properties will not have any intention of getting involved in the local community because that would contradict the rationale of ‘getting away from it all’ and their retirement plans may be centred elsewhere. These owners may contribute to the local community if they shop in the area and employ local firms for building etc. They now have to make a full contribution to Council Tax. Restrictions of selling for this purpose would have to involve compensation of some kind to the original owner if the restriction reduces the sale value.

Purpose built second home complexes such as those round water parks etc are not available for housing as such due to the planning conditions, rather like mobile holiday parks which cannot be use throughout the year, and so should not be a housing issue apart from questions of land use generally.

Improvements and extensions to existing properties to accommodate younger people do happen but the biggest bug-bear is the difficulty of getting planning permission for new houses outside the designated development zones. Again there is little that can be done at the immediate level of local government and the real decisions are made at higher levels. Classic reasons for refusing permission will be that the property would be out of keeping with the landscape (even where the proposal is to rebuild a property which had been in the landscape for many years before planning control was invented) or the access is restricted for emergency vehicles, or access onto the road is inconsistent with the highways policy etc. Within these rules it seems that conversion of barns into dwellings often seems to be acceptable in many cases as does, on occasions, the demolition of an old house to make way for a modern replacement. An additional house adjoining an existing farmhouse or nearby, seems to fall outside the criteria, while housing estates can gradually grow within designated development areas. It is very frustrating for people who have access to land for building but cannot get planning permission but is it equally frustrating to see green field building occurring in a way which would undermine the visual impact of the countryside. All this against a struggling agricultural industry and at a time when food security is becoming recognized as an emerging issue. Somewhere a compromise has to be drawn as a countryside with declining agricultural use and a population imbalance might look pleasant for a while, but it will not last as the people who used to keep it that way gradually leave..

What should be done? The bullet of rural housing needs to be bitten, as indeed does the national problem of a housing shortage. From the citizens point of view this means that the opinions in favour of housing initiatives in the rural community have to be expressed and organized with both local and national politicians. The present situation is destructive of the rural community in the ways outlined above and as a society we either have to accept the consequences of a free property market e.g., desertification and demographic imbalance, or develop equitable methods of intervention.

Dacier