Affordable rural housing: supply of sites
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 Privately
owned sitesChurch land/Charitable bodies Publicly
owned sitesAlternative
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A supply of sites at a price that makes it viable to provide affordable housing is essential if more affordable homes are to be provided in rural areas.
The ARHC recommended that there was further investigation of a range of measures that would encourage public and private sites to come forward for affordable housing development.
The Government would encourage all landowners in rural areas to give serious consideration to releasing land for affordable housing, and would further encourage them to give full consideration to the recommendations in the Commission's report.
Government investment and effective planning policies will have absolutely no impact unless suitable land is released. The Government is keen to make the provision of land as easy as possible.
Privately owned sites
The Government has empowered local planning authorities to consider planning applications to convert traditional farm buildings for housing purposes.
We have established a register of surplus public sector land owned by central government bodies.
We have developed proposals for local planning authorities to encourage more sites to come forward for housing – see Positive Planning and PPS3 (available at http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/planningandbuilding/pps3housing).
Church land/Charitable bodies
Following a recommendation of the ARHC, we have undertaken work to determine whether charity law is inhibiting the Church of England and other denominations in making land available for affordable housing.
Charities that are interested in selling land at below m
arket price for the development of affordable housing need to observe charity law. The law does not prevent a charity selling land for below market price provided that to do so is in furtherance of the charity’s charitable objects. Subject to that, charity trustees are expected to obtain "the best terms that can reasonably be obtained" for any disposition of land.
On the specific case of Church of England glebe land, the Endowments and Glebe Measure 1976 placed control of glebe land in the relevant diocesan board of finance to use it to generate income to pay clergy stipends. Such land is outside the scope of the Charities Act 1993, although as a matter of general law the principle of obtaining the best terms for any disposition would still apply. There may be restrictions imposed by ecclesiastical law but this is a matter for the Church, not Government.
The law offers a clear framework on which landowners can proceed if they wish to provide land for affordable housing.
The Rural Housing Enabler best practice page gives an example of where affordable rural homes have been built on church land recently.
Publicly owned sites
We would like to establish a more comprehensive understanding of surplus public sector land and encourage more public land to be brought back into use, particularly for affordable housing. This would include extending the coverage of the Register of Surplus Public Sector Land (www.englishpartnerships.com). A taskforce had been established by Communities and Local Government and HMT to take this work forward. Although some local authorities had expressed a wish to participate as users of the Register, only one has subsequently registered as a user. We are aiming to look at the Register during 2008 and we are waiting the outcome to the Housing Planning Delivery grant consultation paper which may indicate the best way forward.
Alternative approaches
The Housing Corporation
- is working with others to look at innovative ways of improving land supply, including investigating how enabling land to be leased for affordable rural housing might encourage landowners to make their land available.
- Having made funding available for Community Land Trusts through its national investment programme, is working with Salford University in supporting a number of pilot CLTs – we hope that this will provide us with the pros and cons of a number of CLT models Read more at: http://www.housingcorp.gov.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.11459
Page last
modified: 14 December 2007
Page published: 20 September 2006