A New Housing Crisis?

The new Labour government is aiming to overhaul the planning system and get one and a half million more homes built. It wants half of them to be affordable homes.
But how realistic is this in the desirable South Hams, where average incomes come nowhere near to what’s needed even for a so-called affordable home ?
In fact you’d have to EARN up to 12.6 TIMES the median wage here to afford an averagely priced house.  Just look at the sales particulars on the new builds in Dartington and wonder how any local could ever hope to buy one.

Inappropriate and undeliverable

And where are these going to be built?

Will rural areas see pretty ( but unprotected) villages and farm land under more threat?

Many think so. One councillor, Georgina Allen, told the Pulse: “So far, Labour is worse than the Tories. It has a blind spot towards the countryside.”
She fears that the space between Totnes and Brixham will be built on, to the detriment of the towns. Collaton St Mary for example is expanding right now. Local councils already have to plan how much housing they provide and South Hams, West Devon and Plymouth have a joint strategy which reveals that so far in its ten year plan to 2024 there are in fact 188 MORE dwellings already provided for than the overall target. But they have FAILED to reach their affordable homes target BY 530.

Even before the new Government’s announcement by Angela Rayner that there will be a standard method used to calculate how many homes each council area should provide land for (built mostly by developers, who may or may not want to build ), our Joint Local Plan (JLP) from 2024 to 2029 planned for another 6,936 dwellings. And guess where half of them are destined for? Yup, the South Hams. That’s 689 a year until 2029. Or two East Allington’s worth of people, assuming two per house.

But wait….

The Government’s proposed target for the South Hams is now 875 a year. Say 1,750 people…almost a Modbury! The Government says: ”In all cases, land that is safeguarded for environmental reasons will continue to be protected.”

So what does the sage and sensible South Hams Society [SHS] think about the coming concretisation ? Not much, as it has told the Government.
Richard Howell from SHS said that far from contributing to the Government’s plan for economic growth , house building here may have the opposite effect. More homes (and their occupants) will bring water supply problems, more water quality issues, more traffic, more demand on the NHS and perhaps – certainly? – the beauty which brings tourists here will be eroded bit by bit.
“In other words, increasing the number of homes we have to build each year in the South Hams by 70 per cent will clearly come at an economic cost, do little if anything to help solve our housing crisis, reduce our quality of life, and almost certainly fly in the face of plans for economic growth.”

South Hams and West Devon councils have also responded to the Government’s consultation on new building targets. And they are not happy.
The proposed number of dwellings is: “Inappropriate and undeliverable”.

Local people are suffering. “We have lost a significant proportion of our housing stock, particularly private rented housing, to tourism accommodation. “ (see Pulse article on Air B and Bs). “The higher number of visitors we get each year exposes our housing stock to a larger number of potential buyers, most of which have higher disposable incomes than people earning local wages.”
The council continues: “Despite our spatial constraints and sensitive landscapes, we have continued to deliver a consistent supply of new homes that exceeds our projected change in household growth. It is therefore inexplicable that we should be expected to deliver a huge uplift in housing numbers that is predicated on a housing stock that comprises a large number of dwellings that are not even used as homes [second homes of 15% of the whole in some areas]. It would also appear that our housing figures have been subject to further uplift due to the affordability challenges that we face. Without restricting who we are building new homes for, the only beneficiaries of delivering such a huge uplift in housing numbers will be inward migrants and volume housebuilders.”

So far, Labour is worse than the Tories

They go on to say the planning system is not the problem. More than a million permissions for homes have been granted, but have not been implemented.
“The issue is that housebuilders want to wait until market conditions are optimal to ensure maximum financial returns for shareholders. Reforms to the planning system should focus on ensuring planning permissions are implemented, not requiring local planning authorities to allocate more land or grant more planning permissions.”

And they say there is no evidence that more homes will make it any easier for locals to find affordable homes, especially in a sought after area like the South Hams.