The housing and planning policies that Cornwall needs to address affordability

To say housing and planning is an important issue in Cornwall is a gross understatement. No one is happy with current policies whether affordability, second homes or over development. I am pleased that Mebyon Kernow is leading on this and has today called for planning policy and the whole process from planning to appeals to be devolved to Cornwall. This coincides with my piece in next weeks Cornishman which addresses the issue of affordability.

The question put to all candidates in this general election is:

“The cost of housing - whether it is renting or buying - is becoming out of reach for a vast number of people in Cornwall – what can be done to solve this pressing problem?”

My answer (within a strict 200 word limit) is as follows:

Housing is a huge issue for people in Cornwall, most people of my generation struggle with high prices of both renting and buying, coupled with low wages, it’s a perfect storm, forcing people out of Cornwall.  Yet thousands of houses are being built, unaffordable to the majority of the local population and even those supposedly affordable are fair higher than the average wage can afford. Second homes are ever increasing and thus further increasing demand and prices. The current Labour, Tory and Lib Dem doctrine is developer led resulting in a building boom swallowing up green fields and not addressing our pressing problems of lack of affordability.

This is why I am delighted that this week that my party Mebyon Kernow has called upon planning to be devolved to Cornwall, the ‘Westminster knows best’ one size fits all approach of central government is not working here. The problem of affordability has not been resolved by successive governments and has in fact got much worse. The time has come for a fresh approach to housing in Cornwall. Empowering us to look at new ways of funding and delivering housing that the people of Cornwall both want and can afford.

Dick Cole's recent piece on Cornwall taking control of planning is here

Clegg's using pensions for property scheme, don't hold your breath

The Liberal Democrat leader boasted at the party's annual conference that, his government are announcing a plan to help first time buyers get on the housing ladder. Attracting great headlines and no doubt steadying the queasy Lib Dem membership, this plan sounds great and going by the old maxim if it sounds to be good to be true it probably is. Basically the plan is for first time buyers to use their parents pensions to afford a deposit and voilà break the high house prices versus low wages deadlock, win win, well at least superficially.

Clegg in his leafy suburb, practising his sorry face.

My initial scepticism of the plan was whether it would just be meant for richer families. I asked on twitter if the plans would include state pensions and the replies were none, not a single one. A little odd I thought, so I checked it out and indeed it does not include state pensions, only private pensions. Perhaps the millionaire Clegg in his lovely home in a fashionable neighbourhood of London is unaware, but here among us common folk, private pensions are rarer than Liberal Democrat supporters. The children of fishermen, factory workers, labourers, builders or to put it short many ordinary Cornish people do not have great pension pots to dip into. My parents for one unfortunately were relying upon paying national insurance to get a pension, believing in good faith that would be enough. What hope does this scheme offer the most needy, again and again this government appeals to the most affluent.

This was my initial critique, digging further past the flattering headlines I came across this great piece on the Guardian website Will Nick Clegg's 'pension for property' scheme work. It turns out that the pension providers are very sceptical about this scheme, presumably without their backing this scheme would fail. But that's not the worst thing about it......

Realistically though the Lib Dems are working on an assumption that only 12,500 people would take up the offer. Privately they say the industry suggests a range of 10,000 to 20,000. It's a tiny figure, and doesn't warrant the rather dramatic introduction from Nick Clegg on the Marr show, but better than nothing, they say. link

To put that figure in context there are a lot more people than that on the housing waiting list in Cornwall never mind throughout the UK! This is the problem with the Liberal Democrats and their Conservative chums they recognise problems but don't get even close to dealing with them. Which says a lot for the state of Nick's party, one of the great centre pieces of their conference, the great policy announcement is a half baked idea that will benefit a tiny percentage of people.

My experience on the Politics Show and why Stephen Gilbert needs to read government press releases.

During the last week I was interviewed by BBC Spotlight about my own experiences trying to get on the 'housing ladder'. Parts of my interview were repeated on the Politics Show South West on sunday morning. I was talking about my own sense of frustration, I am one of the many people in Cornwall who want to simply live in a decent house they can afford. For the record (and if you're my landlord reading this) I have no problem with renting in itself. We pay a fair rent for our property and we are lucky to live somewhere that we can afford to pay the rent every month. The trade off however is that we live in a house without such things as central heating, double glazing, a garden, an allocated parking space and there is a limit to what we can do with the property. So with council houses being rarer than rocking horse dung buying is our only option to finding a suitable property.

The link for the show is here the section on affordable housing is about 34 minutes in, but will only be available until this sunday, the fourth of December. The section in which I feature focuses upon the government's new plan to introduce 95% mortgages. So to help first time buyers only a 5% deposit will be needed, a great step forward can't dispute that, but it won't help ordinary Cornish families. As I said on the Politics Show of my family's situation:

"We lack the substantial money needed for a mortgage and to save for a deposit, we don't have money at the end of the month to put forward for a deposit. I don't think we'd meet any criteria for buying a house that was much over a hundred thousand pounds, which is pretty much, every house in Cornwall."  

Even if somehow we found a deposit (and were eligible for the new government scheme), generic mortgage calculators indicate that an income of thirty thousand pounds per year is required to borrow a maximum of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds. With the average wage in Cornwall being about seventeen thousand pounds per year it is easy to see where my own situation and no doubt thousands of other Cornish people's situations are being failed by this new government scheme. The presenter Martyn Oates put this dilemma to the Liberal Democrat MP Stephen Gilbert:

"we've also heard from someone in Penzance desperate to buy his own home, he says because of the high average house prices in Cornwall even with the help of a mortgage indemnity scheme he still wouldn't be able to afford a house in Cornwall."

To which Stephen Gilbert replied: "There's no doubt that for many people it's still going to be challenging." He rightly said that the indemnity scheme will help people and goes on to say that the scheme "is going to help about ninety thousand people all across the country." (presumably meaning the UK and not Kernow). Puzzling enough the government's department in charge of the scheme: the Homes and Communities Agency website states and I quote "Helping nearly 10,500 struggling first time buyers own their own home." I am puzzled about this gigantic discrepancy between the government's figures and Gilbert's proud boasts. Ten thousand throughout the UK, that won't make a dent here or anywhere else. It's also worth noting that this new 'First Buy' scheme only applies to new builds, see my earlier criticisms of other schemes based on this model.

The other part of the government's housing policy is the resurrection of Thatcher's right to buy scheme. Offering council tenants their own properties at 50% of the value. As I blogged before this makes no economic sense, sell a house for half it's worth and you have to sell at least two to replace with one. Right to buy only truly works if a massive building plan is in place to replace stock privatised to tenants. According to Gilbert this is what the government is planning:

"The governments really clear on this Martyn where there is a home sold under right to buy it will be replaced on a one for one basis.... If we are selling one council house we are replacing it with another council house."


I would dispute the fact that the government is being clear on this subject I have seen no such promises as of yet. I sincerely doubt that with this spendthrift (except Trident) government that they will be investing the millions needed to replace housing stock. I can not find any link that promises the government is even replacing sold housing stock let alone doing it like for like. Even if replacing like for like -comes from anything but Gilbert's over active imagination- it's not enough, there aren't enough council houses now, plus the population is growing the government should be building more stock not keeping current inadequate levels.


Gilbert's final boast was:

"This will be the first government in thirty three years, to leave office in four years time with more social homes than we entered office with."


Can someone please remind me to fact check this before the next general election?

a sincere apology to my readers about my housing blog

I must apologise to you all, on monday I blogged on how the new government policy and existing governments policies for housing were failing the people of Cornwall. In it I had written in response to the BBC article titled Get Britain Building, I had wrongly assumed that this was based upon fact and research in this assumption I was wrong, it is little more than a copied and pasted government press release. At that point the actual firm details of the coalitions plans had not been released and I feel I have let myself and my readers down by taking the government and the BBC at their word. I should have waited for the actual figures to be released and analysed and criticised them properly. Research by Channel Four news -and no doubt others-0re01veals that affordable housing is actually down a staggering 97% on work done by the Labour government. Here is the Channel four article the astonishing numbers the housing strategy failed to mention the pdf file of the actual figures proposed is here from the Homes and Communities website. Unfortunately due to the centralisation/ regionalisation of administration the figure available are from the South and South West of England, I can not begin to imagine how Cornish figures could be extracted from this 'region'. It can only be concluded that the affordable housing situation is set to get even worse and with the stagnating economy, stagnating wage levels and price increases due to inflation and the weak pound this blow to affordable housing could not come at a worse time.

I do not feel I have to apologise to Mebyon Kernow, I believe my criticisms of existing government policy whether it be Labour or the Tory-Lib Dem alliance are still valid. MK's position on selling off social housing is now even more prescient, selling them off without replacing like for like will beset our children with the same problems this generation faces. A new injection of cash into building social housing will as a response to the government's short sightedness become more of a priority for MK and for me (in terms of what I write about and personally without such action my family will stay in expensive and unsuitable rental accommodation). MK's other criticism that looking to developers to solve the housing crisis is also still valid, these companies exist to make money. They are not interested in selling houses at a discounted rate if they can make more profit they will. I am at a loss to imagine how Labour's disastrous housing policies could be bested in failing the Cornish people but the coalition somehow have managed it. We need radical action on housing and Cornish solutions to our very unique problems, we owe it to the young people of Cornwall, we owe it to our economy and we owe it to the well being of Cornish society. Again I apologise if I misled my readers into thinking the government was doing something about affordable housing they are not. The cabinet of millionaires have used the rhetoric of affordable housing to mask the fact that the banks and big developers have been handed a gift with this new policy and the people have been sold short again.

Affordable housing and the government's new equity loan scheme a Penzance perspective

Although for donkey's years politicians of every London based party have promised action on affordable housing in Cornwall, none has been forthcoming. Houses in Cornwall are unaffordable to those people that earn the average Cornish wage. If you are looking for a definition of what is unaffordable, scroll through the jobs section of say the Cornishman and note the average wage then scroll through the property section and note the average house price and you'll have some idea what unaffordable is and the situation faced by many in Kernow.

Artists impression of development in Carharrack

So the other day I heard an advert on Pirate FM for the governments new scheme to help first time buyers and I thought great my little family could try that. We rent at the moment and we would like somewhere with a garden for the children and parking would be good too. At our last house the landlord decided to sell up after we had been there a year, so we had to move and we don't want to be in this situation again, especially not with young children. The problem we have faced so far for buying is both getting a deposit together and affording a mortgage that would actually buy a 2 bedroom house, let alone anything else. So the government scheme promises an equity loan (without fees for 5 years) for up to 30% of the value of the property. To qualify your household income has to be less than 60k a year (my wife and I don't earn half that), you have to be unable to afford a house in your area (no problems there then) and you either have to be first time buyers or renting a council or housing association house. Good it sounds promising or so I thought. Then came up to the first problem, for some reason -of which I can't fathom- the money can only be used for specific new builds. So the money can not be used to buy any old house and so the options begin to narrow.

The system is managed by private companies, a firm called South West Homes covers Cornwall and a quick property search reveals that there are a number of properties available under the search term Cornwall West + 2 bed, incidentally the same properties for the 'First Buy' equity loan are the same as those offered for the part rent part buy scheme. There are 8 options, 3 sites to choose from in Camborne, 1 in St Ives, 1 in Sennen, 1 in Porthleven, 1 in Manaccan and 1 in Carharrack. Now herein lies the problem there are none at all in Penzance. Further all the developments are quite rightly designed to fill a local need, so for St Ives priority is given to those with a strong connection with the St Ives, Towednack and Zennor parishes, Porthleven is the same with that parish and neighbouring parishes and the same is true of all of them. So if you live in Penzance not only can you not buy a 2 bed property in the town but you will be at a disadvantage unless you have connections with other parishes.

2 bedroom house in Manaccan

A 3 bedroom search of Cornwall West provides some of the same results (on the same housing estates) but also includes a property in Fowey, quite a wide interpretation of West Cornwall by anyone's standard. There are 10 available sites, the same Sennen, St Ives, Porthleven, Carharrack and Camborne estates as before. The 3 bedrooms not previously mentioned include another St Ives estate, St Erth, Hayle, Fowey and another Camborne development, the St Erth development has so far been the closest to Penzance (about 7 miles), but  for the St Erth development a local connection to St Erth is required. The Hayle development isn't so fussy about a local connection. The 3 bed in St Ives is less specific, simply stating a local connection.

The 3 bedroom house in St Ives

So for most of the properties a local connection is a problem, which is difficult if you do not have family scattered all over the place. Say for example all your family live in Penzance you would not be a priority, similarly if your family live in Gulval/ Newlyn/ Mousehole/ St Buryan etc and you live in Penzance no luck either. Personally my problem is I want to live in Penzance, I like it here, my daughter will be going to school here soon and my wife works in town.Which leads me to wonder how many other people are in the same situation as we are?

In conclusion, the new equity based scheme is a step in the right direction, it does give first time buyers a help with the high costs of house buying and I for one welcome it. However, my personal reservations I am sure are shared by many in my situation who want to live in Penzance and others who want to live in Newlyn or Helston and no end of places in West Cornwall. It is regrettable that the equity loan scheme is not transferable to older houses as this would allow the flexibility to give people in areas without developments a chance to benefit from this scheme.

If you are eligible for one of the developments I have discussed please do go on to Direct Gov to read more about the scheme here: Equity Loans -how they work and the South West Homes website for specific details of houses in Cornwall: Property search page and I wish you the best of luck.
(all pictures taken from South West Homes website).