Press Release

Rural Wales needs more homes that people can afford

4 June 2008

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A report published today (4 June) calls for a huge increase in affordable housing supply in rural Wales. It finds that there is an increasing unmet housing need in rural Wales: homes are getting more expensive; more people are homeless; and there is even less social housing in rural areas than in towns and cities. It calls on the Welsh Assembly Government and local authorities to do more and work smarter to ensure Wales’s rural housing needs are met.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation Commission on Rural Housing in Wales has spent the last eight months analysing new and existing statistical data, receiving evidence and listening to people all over the country to gauge the scale of Wales’s rural housing problem.

The average house price is now more than five times the average income in all rural local authority areas. Large numbers of the rural population are prevented from getting decent and affordable housing within or close to their local communities. The Commission found that, unless significant changes are made, there is a real danger that communities in parts of rural Wales will lose the next generation of young people. This could cause social, cultural and welfare problems for rural communities in the future. The current plans of the Assembly Government are ambitious, but need to do more to meet rural housing need.

The Commission has a number of recommendations on how more affordable homes could be made available:

Better use could be made of current housing stock – it estimates that there are up to 18,000 vacant properties in rural areas;
The Assembly Government should develop and promote good practice guides for local authorities on how to bring vacant properties back into use;
A significant proportion of second-home council tax should be used by rural local authorities to respond to housing needs in their areas. One suggestion of how the fund could be used is to set up a network of Rural Housing Enablers who, amongst other duties, would help to identify needs and seek sites for affordable housing.
To meet these strategic needs, the Assembly Government must ensure it has enough internal resources in place. Local authorities should consider jointly funding specialist housing and planning staff, to help ensure they use the planning system more effectively and innovatively.

Commissioners were disappointed to find that currently key statistics on the changing scale of housing needs in rural Wales are not being collated and analysed by the Assembly Government and local government. This made it difficult to assess the precise scale of the problem and the resources required to meet it. It also raises questions about how the government is able to track the problem when it does not collate quality data.

Derec Llwyd Morgan, chair of the Commission, said: "The Commission found that there is a huge unmet need for affordable housing in rural Wales. Meeting the need requires urgent action. Powers exist at both local and national level to improve the situation, but a marked response will require cooperation, innovation, strong leadership and great political will."