“Increasing a target that East Devon is already struggling to meet is a pointless exercise if the Government does not address the underlying challenges.” [Richard Foord, MP]
“We are risking the irrevocable loss of our precious rural green areas and countryside to build houses that would have been far more useful if they had been built somewhere else.” [Mel Stride, MP]
.
We need more housing to be built in the Sid Valley, but it won’t be easy – councils are struggling to provide the right sort of local, social housing; it’s going to be difficult to make sure new homes are also net-zero; and are we going to be able to build ‘affordable homes at the scale required’?
In the last 24 hours, two Devon MPs have voiced their concerns – with Sidmouth’s MP looking at housing expansion and Mid Devon’s MP feeling we need to build houses – but we can’t just build anywhere.
Richard Foord, then, points to the fact that almost 57% of our land is a National Landscape (known previously as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) – which means that we have to protect the countryside from overdevelopment:
We cannot simply expand rural towns and villages at the rate that the top-down targets imply. Indeed, towns are already sprawling towards neighbouring villages without the necessary infrastructure to support this growth.
This is why I am opposed to the Labour Government’s push to jack-up the top-down housing targets without first taking into account the need to plan land use in rural areas like ours. We need to balance competing needs with a land use framework. Increasing a target that East Devon is already struggling to meet is a pointless exercise if the Government does not address the underlying challenges.
I want to see a focus on creating balanced and sustainable communities, where we build homes, not just houses, and where these developments are matched with infrastructure improvements and greater protections – for agricultural land, recreational spaces and natural habitats.
Here in Devon the countryside sets our county apart. We must ensure that we protect it, both from overdevelopment and from the environmental vandalism of rogue companies – who care little for protecting nature.
And Mel Stride, Mid Devon’s MP, says pretty much the same – that building for building’s sake is not the way forward and that we need to build more, but build smarter:
If building hundreds of thousands of extra homes each year is going to actually deliver the benefits we want it to, they have to be the right houses in the right places. There is no point in building just anywhere, even if it would technically allow the new Housing Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, to say she has met her target. Homes need to be built where people actually want to move to, and normally that means building where there are jobs being created and the local economy needs workers.
With that in mind, I raised an eyebrow at the announcement of the new formula for calculating local housing targets to meet Labour’s pledges on housebuilding. The government seem to be expecting some parts of the country, including rural communities like ours, to take a much bigger share of the burden than others. Not only does that not seem fair, it also seems economically wrong too. The whole point of the exercise is that we have consistently added to our housing supply more slowly than demand for housing has risen. If we are not going to build in the places where demand is actually highest, we are wasting our time. Worse than that, we are risking the irrevocable loss of our precious rural green areas and countryside to build houses that would have been far more useful if they had been built somewhere else…
If we get it right, a housebuilding drive has the potential to unlock huge economic potential, better jobs, better productivity and ultimately a better quality of life for many people. But build for building’s sake is not the way to do that. Build more, yes, but build smarter.
…