Housing crisis: Government gets behind community homes with £163m fund

Councillor John Blackie, left, and the members of the Upper Dales community land trust. (Courtesy Photo)

It’s not that John Blackie wanted to start building houses - it’s just that there was no choice.

As county councillor, Blackie has led the fight against cuts and closures in the villages of Hawes and High Abbotside in the Yorkshire Dales. When the Post Office was threatened with closure, residents took over. When bus services dwindled, they organised a white bus service to meet residents at the nearest train station. Late last year, residents even stepped in to save the petrol station, without which they would be forced to trek 36 miles to fill cars and farming vehicles.

But post offices and petrol stations need customers — and customers need somewhere to live. As planning restrictions prices rise in Yorkshire Dales National Park, only the wealthy can afford to buy homes, or second homes in this place. So many young families have been priced out that Arkengarthdale Primary School, which celebrated 350 years in 2009, has just 14 pupils left.

“Unless we get houses for young families the writing is on the wall for that school,” Blackie says. “Once you lose your school you begin to see the pillars of infrastructure collapse one by one and then the community doesn’t have a bright future.”

So John Blackie and the Upper Dales Community Partnership, the group of residents that masterminded the community takeovers, decided to start a sub-group dedicated to affordable housing. That group has just submitted plans for four affordable homes to the Yorkshire Dales National Park for permission to build.

“We are aiming to have the permission in hand by October or November and the properties open the following September subject to finding funding,” Blackie says. “We really hope that the people who come along will be young families who can boost the numbers in the school.”

On July 2, the Government stepped in to help Blackie and other community groups like the Upper Dales Community Partnership with the creation of a Community Housing Fund worth £163 million. Faced with an escalating housing crisis that is pushing up prices beyond the budgets of many low-income families and first time buyers, politicians have decided to enable residents like Blackie and the Upper Dales residents to take matters into their own homes and explore community homes.

This is the biggest investment in community-led housing in 30 years. It comes on the heels of £60 million of funding for community housing distributed to 148 local authorities in 2016-17. But it goes further, allowing any community land trust, which is a trust set up to keep homes affordable for the community, to apply for money to start planning housing.

“This fund will help communities to build thousands of genuinely affordable homes,” says Tom Chance, the director of the National Community Land Trust Network. “It should also build up a market for community led housing that can grow and grow in years to come.”

Up to now, many of these groups have had to find their own sources of funding. Steve Hoey, the community land trust director at Leeds Community Homes, says his group will apply to the fund for housing projects in Leeds itself and also to support planning in the surrounding area.

“It will be a massive boost to our whole sector,” Hoey says. “Groups needs support at the early stages. They wouldn’t otherwise have the money to form their group legally, start planning, start looking at sites and all those things that you need support for up front.”

Hoey and Leeds Community Homes had previously received funding through Locality, a Lottery-funded charity that helps community businesses, and by appealing to the community itself through a crowdfunding campaign in 2017 that raised £360,000 towards sixteen homes. The existence of this funding shows the Government is willing to support groups who choose to set out on their own.

Hoey says: “This is a recognition that the Government should fund affordable homes in order to get projects off the ground.”

Community land trusts are seen by many as an antidote to the housing crisis because they keep homes affordable in perpetuity, or for as long as they exist. The sector has grown six-fold in the last six years as the UK housing crisis has worsened. There are now over 290 community land trusts in the UK, with the largest having over 1000 members each. While the number of homes provided by these trusts is currently around 800, there are plans to develop a further 5800 homes in the next few years.

Most of them come together, like Leeds Community Homes, because the desperate need for homes is not addressed by local authorities. Co-founder Hoey was previously the director of a self-help housing project in Leeds called Canopy Housing. “I have been touched by the experiences that I have encountered over the last 25 years from people who have been homeless and disadvantaged being priced out of the housing market or not finding the support they need.”

Some have reservations that the Government’s Community Housing Fund is appropriate for community land trusts who want to keep homes affordable in perpetuity. In its second phase, the fund will provide for affordable housing, not just planning. It may require groups to register as providers of housing. While there are some existing protections for community land trusts, this may make them vulnerable to right to buy legislation, which would jeopardise the central aim of community land trusts to keep housing affordable for as long as it exists. The Community Land Trusts Network is lobbying for full exemption.

John Blackie says landowners in the Upper Dales are unlikely to gift or give land for community housing at a discounted rate if they do not have the assurance that the homes on that land will stay within the community: “If they then say, for the new fund anyone can apply, but it comes with right-to-buy, it undermines the initiative.”

At the moment, Housing Associations are piloting right-to-buy on a voluntary basis. Some community land trusts are concerned that the legislation for Housing Association could be applied to them. Blackie hopes the Government will provide a full exemption from right-to-buy for community land trusts for the second phase of the funding, in order to help communities fighting for survival. “I’m happy with the community doing it, but a community with limited resources and limited expertise need every assistance,” he says. “Unless you have young families able to live in those remote dales, those dales don’t have a future.”