Out of reach for country dwellers

By Jeremy Cooke
BBC News

Matthew Taylor MP says lack of cheap housing is "killing the countryside"

Successive governments have identified the lack of affordable housing in the British countryside as a problem.

Successive governments have also tried - and largely failed - to come up with a solution.

Put simply, the issue is that people who have grown up in the countryside, who work in perfectly respectable but moderately paid jobs, cannot afford to make their own home in their home community.

Clearly it is a problem for those struggling to keep families together and protect their way of life.

But, the argument goes, there is far more at stake than that - especially as an estimated 800,000 are now moving into the countryside each year.

Unusually, the Liberal Democrat MP Matthew Taylor was asked by the Labour government to study and report on the state of the rural economy in England, and specifically on the countryside housing crisis.

The schoolteacher, the plumber, the shop worker, the pub worker cannot afford to live in our villages and as a result they are dying Matthew Taylor MP Home prices 'hit rural lives'

And he is issuing a stark warning that unless there is radical action to tackle the problem, our rural communities will pay a heavy price.

Speaking in his own beautiful constituency in Cornwall, he said: "We are in danger of killing the countryside.

"We are not allowing affordable housing to be built for people who actually work in the community. The schoolteacher, the plumber, the shop worker, the pub worker cannot afford to live in our villages and as a result they are dying."

After months of investigation, Mr Taylor is calling for a radical change in planning policy which so often sees what are, in effect, blanket bans on development in the countryside.

He supports schemes like one under consideration in the lovely village of St Just in Roseland.

A group of eight mates, most of them builders and tradesmen, have bought a plot on the edge of the village with a plan to build their own affordable homes.

For Roland Michell it offers the chance to stay in the place he grew up and where his mother still lives.

Some residents say new-builds may unfairly reduce their house prices

"The natural progress is for you to get married, buy a house and have a family. But for us it just hasn't been that way."

But despite the backing of many villagers, there is a reminder here that trying to "buck the market" to provide subsidised housing can be a hugely controversial move.

I sat and had tea with a group of locals who are dead against the proposed "affordable" development.

For them there should be no "right" to live anywhere. They reminded me that their own, mega-expensive, houses were bought at the full market price, and that any development which reduces the value of their property is simply not fair.

Now it is up to the government to read Matthew Taylor's report and decide what, if anything, to do.

One thing that is certain is that people in the countryside will be watching closely.

A poll for the 20th anniversary of BBC1's Countryfile programme found that the lack of affordable housing tops the list of what people believe to be the biggest challenges facing our rural communities.

By the way, that first edition of Countryfile back in 1988 included a segment on - you guessed it - affordable rural housing.