SEBG News Archive
Rural exception sites – a rural housing solution, by Andrew Bruce Wootton, deputy chairman, Scottish Estates Business Group
3rd December 2005When the Scottish Parliament was re-established we were told in no uncertain terms that it would provide Scottish solutions to Scottish problems. The question that should be asked though is whether we are missing a trick by failing to embrace suitable solutions that are not stamped ‘Made in Scotland’.
To some of us working and living in rural Scotland, there appears to be a golden opportunity to make progress on the issue of affordable housing. If anyone is in any doubt as to how acute the problem is they need look no further than the recent decision to suspend the right to buy for almost 2,000 council house tenants in the Highlands in an attempt to ease the pressure for affordable housing.
Contrary to popular belief, the issue isn’t usually the availability of land. Too often landowners are wrongly accused of failing to release land for development when in fact there is no prospect of the land in question being given planning approval.
Everyone is agreed that ‘something must be done’ and there is a range of initiatives, large and small, which are underway. However, there is one potential solution to a fundamental part of the housing problem that has not taken off in Scotland in the way that it should – the use of rural exception sites.
These are sites that aren’t allocated for development in a local housing plan so wouldn’t normally receive planning permission. Under an explicit rural exception sites policy, such sites could be considered for housing if they had the support of the local community.
Regrettably, one of the major political drawbacks for the introduction of these sites could well be that they are unquestionably a solution that works well in England.
Since 1989, rural exception sites in England have enabled more than 12,000 new homes to be provided in small villages for local people unable to find affordable housing. The schemes that have been built are usually small (fewer than 10 houses in most cases) and because the land could not attract planning permission for any other type of housing, the sites are made available at substantially below conventional market prices. Houses for rent and for shared ownership have been provided mainly by housing associations and the legal agreements attached to the planning permission ensure that the houses remain available under these terms in perpetuity.
As things stand in Scotland, the Scottish Executive is somewhat mealie-mouthed in its guidance to local authorities, saying merely that planning authorities are encouraged to take account of local circumstances and that new housing may have a part to play in economic regeneration.
If the Executive were explicitly to promote rural exception sites it would do so much to encouarge innovative developments which may not have been forseen when the local housing plan was drawn up.
The problem of afforable housing and the sustainability of rural communities is an issue that painfully requires solutions and there is one lying on our doorsteps even though it is (whisper it) made in England.
