Caroline Voaden

I am very pleased to be in the Chamber to speak in support of this Bill, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on bringing it forward. He has deep expertise in this area, having spent many years dealing with the tragedy that is homelessness in Cornwall. My constituency of South Devon, just up the road from Cornwall, is one of the most beautiful parts of the country—possibly more beautiful than Cornwall, I would argue, but we will not get into that. It has a stunning coastline, rolling farmland and villages that look like they belong on a postcard, but a postcard is exactly what some of those villages are in danger of becoming, because behind the beautiful views lies a housing crisis that is literally hollowing out our communities. In 1997, the average home in Devon cost about £60,000; today, it costs around £300,000, and wages have nowhere near kept up. In the South Hams, the gap between house prices and local earnings has widened by 159% since 1997. A home now costs more than 13 times what a local person can earn in a year, yet affordable homes make up just 9% of Devon’s housing stock, half the national average. Devon also faces pressures that many other parts of the country do not: second homes, holiday lets and serious levels of inward migration, particularly of people who have sold up elsewhere and retired to the coast. I make that last point with no resentment—who could blame anyone for wanting to retire to Devon? However, the effect is that local people end up bidding against buyers who have decades of equity behind them. Devon already has an average age of 50, and it is local young people and key workers who are left with nowhere to go. It is becoming impossible to recruit for lower-paid jobs, including seriously needed community jobs such as teachers, nurses and healthcare workers, because there is literally nowhere that they can afford to live. None of this is driven by the politics of envy; it is about basic social justice, and whether the people who keep our communities running can afford to live in them. The Bill that we are debating does two things, both of which are absolutely vital to South Devon. First, it extends the community right to buy, so that parish and town councils, community land trusts and other community-led organisations can designate redundant buildings and land on the edge of a community. They would have first refusal for an option period of up to five years to use that land for genuinely affordable homes, held in perpetuity for local people. The Bill builds on the provisions already set out in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 and gives communities the tools to overcome ransom strips and access problems and to use compulsory purchase powers where necessary. The answer to the housing crisis—I have said this many times in the House and will keep doing so—is small sites on the edge of every village and rural exception sites. Every village needs a few new homes to survive: not 50, 100 or 200-plus identikit houses plonked on a field by the side of a town 30, 40 or 50 miles away, but 10, 12 or 20 houses in the right place for the people who need them. I recently met Paula, who has lived in a local village for 20-plus years. She is the kind of person every village needs. She walks the dogs. When someone comes out of hospital, she brings food to their home. She looks after homes that are second homes. She does a bit of cleaning. She does all those things for people in the village—everybody could do with a pair of helping hands at some point. Paula’s landlord is trying to evict her. There is nowhere else she can live that is in or near the village, so not only will she lose her home, but she will lose her livelihood and her income. She will be forced to move 10 or 20 miles away to find a social or affordable home elsewhere in Devon, which will be like finding hen’s teeth. She will lose her entire network—her social network and her livelihood—because there are no social or affordable homes in her village. We need homes that let young people who grew up in communities stay there if they want. We do not want all young people to have to leave Devon because there is nowhere for them to live. We need homes that let older residents downsize and free up family houses. We need homes that keep the schools open and the bus running, but it is not happening. I recently met a local housing developer. He told me that with a small site it takes just as much preparation, red tape and admin to get spades into the ground as with a large site. The cost of getting there is the same, but for a fraction of the return, so for many developers it is simply not worth building a few homes on the edge of a village. That is why it does not happen: instead, developers choose to build huge sites on the edge of towns, miles away from where homes are needed. This is where I take issue with the policy of “Let’s build loads of homes” or “Let’s build a million and a half homes”. They are being built at scale in the wrong place. For someone who lives in a large rural community, it does not work. Not everybody can go to Plymouth or Exeter and buy a house in a huge development like Sherford. People want to stay in their local community. That is where community-led delivery comes in, which is why this element of the Bill is needed. In Salcombe, a community land trust was ready to deliver homes that would have met virtually the entire social housing need of the people in that community on the list; I think there were 18 households on the list. After years and years of effort and commitment from some incredibly committed local volunteers, the community land trust has been stopped in its tracks because the landlord decided at the eleventh hour that he did not want to sell the field. This Bill could have changed that. It could have led to homes for local families who have no other possibility of staying in their local community. Then there is Clay Park in Dartington, with 39 energy-efficient homes, all for social rent for people with local connections. It is exactly what rural areas need, but it took 16 years to get from the first community meeting to the building work, which started last year. That is the reality of trying to build differently. Community groups give up. They get worn down by the red tape. In the time it takes to put a spade in the ground, children become adults. The people who need the homes have to move away or buy elsewhere because they cannot wait any longer. Villages cave in and let a developer put 50 homes on a field. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) says, affordable homes end up as market-value homes because the permissions are changed. People cannot get more imaginative proposals through the hoops. That has to change. We have to make it easier to build differently. This Bill would do exactly that, so I cannot understand why Labour Members are so adamant about opposing it. No, it will not fix the housing problem in the UK, and no, it is not radical enough—we all know that we need radical solutions—but it would address part of the problem. In communities like ours, that is vital. Secondly, the Bill would give communities the power to limit the number of second homes and holiday lets in their area if they want to. A new C5 use class would require planning permission for the conversion of a permanently occupied home into a second home or holiday let. Local plans and neighbourhood plans could set limits on the proportion of such homes, and the power would be available only to those places that chose to use it. It would not necessarily need to be used in places without a second home issue. It would be used in places where there is a tipping point at which the loss of more permanent residents threatens the very viability of a community. Any C5 permission would revert to C3 when the property changed hands, to avoid perverse incentives. It would not last into perpetuity.