Alison Ward, Executive Director of Middlemarch Community Led Housing, shares emerging data on the pipeline for rural affordable schemes and replicable and scalable examples from Middlemarch’s partnerships. She demonstrates how CLTs have become a key vehicle for rural affordable home delivery in Devon, where every strategic partnership scheme in Devon’s Affordable Homes Programme pipeline is a partnership between a housing association and a CLT – all of which are supported by the Middlemarch CLH team – and half of the Continuous Market Engagement pipeline is CLT-led.
Feature image: Christow CLT
Last week was Rural Housing Week, which meant that lots of us working in the world of rural community led housing spent time thinking about what it would take to support more rural communities to get the homes that they want and need. I’ve been reflecting on something that’s quietly, but noticeably, happening in my home county of Devon – and what this means for how we scale up community led affordable housing in rural areas of the UK.
Two new national reports have been released in the last couple of weeks The Case for Affordable Rural Housing (published by the Longleigh Foundation) and Mind the Gap: How Rural Communities Are Falling Behind on Affordable Homes (Arc4, Rural Housing Solutions, English Rural) which have focused in on the acute and growing crisis in rural housing. People often think that the housing crisis is worse in cities and large towns, but the data says differently – Mind the Gap found that the need for affordable homes is nearly 50% higher in rural areas than in urban areas, with the smallest rural parishes experiencing the most severe shortages. Despite this, delivery is falling behind.
But here in Devon, we’re seeing something different, despite the delivery of affordable homes falling way below what’s needed – as highlighted in the report of the Devon Housing Commission last year, which was a remarkable deep dive into the challenges the county faces and the reality of the situation. What is becoming clear is that community land trusts are no longer operating at the margins. They are becoming central to how rural affordable housing is being delivered, and an example of how we scale the model nationwide.
At Middlemarch Community Led Housing CIC, with the support of the CLT Network, we’ve been supporting CLTs in Devon, Dorset and Somerset for many years. We help communities to understand housing need, access land, find funding, negotiate the planning world, partner with housing associations, and bring forward plans for homes that are genuinely affordable and locally controlled. But even I hadn’t appreciated just how central CLTs have become to rural delivery until I attended a recent event hosted by Devon Communities Together, where we looked at some emerging data on the pipeline for rural affordable housing schemes.
- Every strategic partnership scheme in Devon’s Affordable Homes Programme pipeline is a partnership between a housing association and a CLT – and every one is supported by our team.
- Half of the Continuous Market Engagement pipeline is also CLT-led.
Of course, it is fair to say that pipelines aren’t always realised, although at Middlemarch we have plenty of evidence to show that these homes are likely to come forward. But what we can see is that other, non CLT schemes, are not featuring strongly in the pipeline. Homes are not coming forward in the numbers needed via the conventional route currently, CLTs are providing strength and resilience to the pipeline, and housing associations partnering with CLTs are a key part of this – especially strategic partners.
These homes are typically small in number – usually about 10 per scheme – but their impact is great for those places. They help keep families in their communities, sustain local schools and services, and build long-term affordability into the heart of villages and small towns. CLTs also often take on other assets in their communities once a housing project is completed. Examples of this can be seen in Queen Camel CLT, which took on the old school building in their village and runs it as a community enterprise; Christow CLT, which has developed a community shop for their Dartmoor village, as well as a small grants scheme and wildlife projects; and Parracombe CLT, a village of less than 300 people in Exmoor which actually delivered their community shop and took on the village hall even before spades hit the ground for their scheme of 6 affordable homes.
This shift didn’t happen by chance. It’s the result of:
- Years of groundwork by communities
- Strong partnerships with housing associations
- Skilled enabling support
- Local authorities being supportive – financially and otherwise
- And, crucially, access to pre-development funding (much of it from the Community Housing Fund)
The Longleigh and Mind the Gap reports both call for a more joined-up approach to rural housing – one that values community leadership, removes barriers to land and funding, and invests in what works. Devon offers a living example of that in action, and it points to the potential scale of what could be achieved more widely.
The CLT Network’s most recent State of the Sector report modelled what would happen if CLT and housing association partnerships were given the support they needed to thrive. If a third of rural parishes in England and Wales delivered 15 CLT homes each over a 15-year period the result would be around 30,000 new permanently community led affordable homes. This would be house building at a scale that would make a real impact on the rural housing crisis. What’s more, these homes would be shaped by local people and genuinely
meeting community need – welcomed by communities rather than imposed on them.
In Devon, we’re already seeing early signs of that trajectory. The presence of CLTs in the Affordable Homes Programme pipeline, and the growing number of partnerships with housing associations, suggest that community land trusts could account for a substantial share of rural delivery in the years ahead.
Looking beyond Devon, my Middlemarch colleague Steve Watson and I had the opportunity last year to take part in the CLT Network’s Growth Lab initiative, funded by the Laudes Foundation. The Growth Lab is essentially a business accelerator for community led housing, set up to explore how models such as CLT and housing association partnerships can be scaled to reach more places and people.
It gave us the time and space to reflect on what had made CLT and housing association partnerships so effective in Devon, and to consider how those conditions could be replicated elsewhere. Through this work we identified several rural regions outside Devon that share the same key ingredients for success: high house prices compared to average local incomes; lots of second and holiday homes; and sensitive landscapes that make mainstream development inappropriate or difficult to achieve. These places included parts of Cornwall, Norfolk, Sussex, Kent, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, North Yorkshire, the Isle of Wight, Cumbria, Gloucestershire and Derbyshire. The research showed that, with the right enabling support and investment (particularly in the pre-development stage – revenue funding to help ‘de-risk’ housing projects is critical), the number of CLT and housing
association partnerships could grow significantly. These are places where the conditions are right, and where a focused programme could unlock real growth.
I have heard many times that community led housing is a fringe idea, and homes provided are a drop in the ocean, and projects take too long, etc, but what I have now seen is that in rural areas, it’s becoming the most viable, and sometimes the only route to delivering affordable homes.