Living Working Countryside The Taylor Review of Rural Economy and Affordable Housing ISBN: 978 1 4098 0328 7 Price: £20.00 © Matthew Taylor, 2008 Copyright in the typographical arrangement rests with the Crown. Published by: Department for Communities and Local Government Eland House Bressenden Place London SW1E 5DU Telephone: 020 7944 4400 Website: www.communities.gov.uk Communities and Local Government Publications PO Box 236 Wetherby West Yorkshire LS23 7NB Tel: 08701 226 236 Fax: 08701 226 237 Textphone: 08701 207 405 Email: [email protected] Online via the Communities and Local Government website: www.communities.gov.uk July 2008 Product code: 08REAH05452 ISBN: 978 1 4098 0328 7 The Taylor Review Contents Foreword 3 Introduction 5 Chapter 1 – Living, Working Countryside 25 Rural pressures – increasingly unsustainable rural communities Restrictive planning practice Low supply of affordable housing Low local wages and unfulfilled economic potential Migratory pressure and change Unaffordable house prices Rural England – understanding the context Is England still a green and pleasant land? What impact will new housing growth have on the countryside? Will these new homes solve rural affordability? The sustainability trap Conclusion 1 Chapter 2 – Living, Working, Market Towns 51 Where new housing growth will impact most – our market towns 2020: A missed opportunity? The consequences of poorly planned housing growth The alternative: new neighbourhoods and community extensions Master planning for rural communities Genuinely empowering community participation in planning Creating greener communities Changing planning practice to deliver better places Chapter 3 – Living, Working, Villages 83 What is meant by smaller rural communities? Housing need in smaller rural communities Policy options for smaller rural communities Community Led Affordable Housing: A new approach for exception policy Getting Landowners to provide more sites What kind of Affordable Housing? The potential of Community Land Trusts Second homes and holiday lets The Taylor Review Chapter 4 – Living, Working, Rural Economies 119 The Importance of Strong Rural Economies The New Rural Economies Characteristics and Challenges for Rural Economies Better Support for Rural Economies (1) Promoting rural economic development (2) Ensuring a good supply of sites and premises (3) Better support for home-based business Need for better data Home extensions Home based work in affordable housing Dedicated ‘live/work’ properties and rural business ‘hubs’ Chapter 5 – Unblocking the system 145 (1) Regional Spatial Strategies (RSSs) (2) The Local Development Framework (LDF) process (3) Providing strong accessible evidence (4) Local Authority Capacity (5) Thresholds for affordable housing contributions (6) Assessing Economic Viability and Negotiating with Developers 2 (7) Pre-application discussions (8) The Planning Inspectorate (9) Costs of delivering Affordable Housing Annex A: Terms of reference 171 Annex B: Consultation process 172 Annex C: Glossary of terms 188 Annex D: End notes 194 The Taylor Review Foreword The English countryside is a wonderful place to live and work – if you can afford a home, if you can find a reasonably paid job. But for too many people country life is challenging. House prices are significantly higher than the national average while rural wages are significantly lower. Affordable homes are few and far between and business growth is too often restricted. As an MP who has lived and worked all his life in a rural community I was delighted to be asked by the Prime Minister to review how we nurture a living, working countryside. As part of this Review I have travelled all round the country, met many people and organisations and received hundreds of submissions of evidence. This Review has explored in depth how the planning system is responding to these challenges, and concludes that the countryside is at a crossroads. 3 For many villages and hamlets the choice is between becoming ever more exclusive enclaves of the wealthy and retired, or building the affordable homes to enable people who work in these communities to continue to live in them. In many cases just a handful of well designed homes, kept affordable in perpetuity for local people, will make all the difference to the sustainability of the community and its services. At the same time, we need to make sure that there are better opportunities for the people who live in these small rural communities to find quality work, and build successful businesses. Otherwise we will see more and more villages turn into commuter dormitories, at the cost of fewer local jobs, declining local services, and the loss of genuine community life. Market towns face a different choice. The demand to live in a rural community means many market towns are growing fast. One option is to stick with current planning practices which are too often ringing country towns with anonymous housing estates, business and retail parks. The alternative, advocated in this report, is to learn the lessons of the past and follow the example of a handful of places that have pioneered a different approach. They have challenged planning practices to deliver genuinely attractive new neighbourhoods and community extensions which actually enhance the existing town. The Taylor Review This Review spells out a vision of a living, working sustainable countryside. It explains how this vision can be delivered. To get there, there are choices to be made and they need to be made now. It can be done. All we need is the will to do it. Matthew Taylor MP 4 The Taylor Review Introduction 5 The Taylor Review Introduction 1. This country’s rural communities cannot stand still. Change is inevitable whether development takes place or not, and the choices we make today will shape tomorrow’s character of the market towns, villages and hamlets that make up our countryside. 2. This report sets out a vision of flourishing, vibrant communities that will be genuinely sustainable – socially, economically and environmentally, and delivers a clear message: the planning process has to become an engine of regeneration or we face a future of decline. 3. The overriding objective of this report is to help ensure the planning system brings a positive, lasting legacy of places in which people actually want to live. It suggests changes to the planning system necessary to deliver vibrant communities with a distinct identity, in keeping with the character of their surroundings, and which enhance the local landscape and bio-diversity. 4. This is a crucial moment in terms of making the decisions that will shape the future of these communities. 5. Last summer the Government announced a target to deliver three million new homes by 2020. While the great majority of these homes will be delivered in urban settings or as urban 6 extensions to our larger cities and towns, the planned growth will also have a fundamental impact across the countryside. 6. For many rural market towns the scale of new housing planned over this period will have a dramatic impact on the size and nature of the present communities. How this development takes place will significantly influence their future character. 7. Outside the market towns the picture will be much more mixed. Some villages will grow substantially. Others risk seeing little or no development. These villages, “protected” from development, face becoming increasingly exclusive communities of the retired and of wealthy commuters travelling ever longer distances to work, losing their services like schools and shops, and with local jobs either lost, or serviced by people commuting in from larger towns. 8. Unsurprisingly, the decision to plan the delivery of such a large number of new homes has been controversial nationally, and even more so in many of the individual communities waking up to the prospect of substantial new housing development. In spite of this, all the major political parties, and respondents to this review ranging from the Home Builders Federation to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, agree that substantial The Taylor Review numbers of new homes are needed. Yet the impact of the credit crunch is leading to a drop in house building at the same time as rising mortgage rates and deposit requirements are making homes even more unaffordable. 9. It is not within the remit of this report to debate the precise number of homes that should be delivered or the number of years in which it is best to deliver them. Instead, it seeks to shift the debate from the numbers, to consider the longer term questions of how we can manage and plan for the substantial development that is both inevitable and necessary, whatever the precise timescale or numbers. 10. Throughout the course of this Review no one has argued for the substantive relaxation of planning controls in the countryside to allow a development free-for-all. Equally, it is clear that over-zealous or ill-thought through restriction of development in rural areas has already had unintended consequences in holding back rural economies and making rural homes increasingly unaffordable – consequences which make the countryside less, not more sustainable. 11. The planning system has a crucial role to promote and deliver sustainable communities – ensuring development occurs in the right place at the right time and makes a positive contribution to people’s lives – providing homes, jobs, opportunity and enhancing 7 quality of life. It must simultaneously protect and enhance the natural and historic