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Who you will house?

You will be setting up a CLT with a clear idea of the need for affordable homes in your community.

To convince the local authority planning and housing departments, this will need to be backed up by a systematic local Housing Needs survey, ideally carried out by the rural housing enabler for your locality (but they are not universal so you may have to do your own).

The survey needs to identify the housing needs in you commnity and find out as precisely as possible at what level those who need homes will be able to secure mortgages or find the cash for a deposit. Moreover, and if the need identified is for rented homes, the survey should pin down the relationship between current rents and the Local Reference Rents.

A housing allocation policy will need to be agreed with the local housing authority to secure their support and to demonstrate that the basis on which people will be offered housing when demand exceeds supply is fair and justifiable.

The planning permission may well be granted conditional on a Section 106 agreement, especially if it is a rural exception site or an allocated site for affordable housing or if provision of affordable homes is a condition of a larger scheme. The Section 106 agreement will define 'affordable' and include reference to local priority. It also impacts on the CLT’s ability to raise loans and individual part-equity lessees’ ability to raise a mortgage.

This part of the journey is thus all about engaging with different parts of the local authority so they are persuaded of the need and so that the documentation that results from the subsequent dialogue does not contain impediments to delivery.