'Theme park' fears for Peak District as local people priced out of housing

Councillors are eager to ensure the Peak District is not just a home for the elderly and wealthy, with significant issues when it comes to building affordable homes.

At a Derbyshire Dales District Council meeting, members debated how the Peak District National Park needs to do more to “retain young people”.

Councillors said towns and villages in the Peak District, an extremely popular international tourist destination, were not “museums” and must not become them – and should not be reserved for the wealthy.

Members discussed how young people raised in the Peak District often have to leave the area in which they were born to rent or buy a home, due to the cost.

Meanwhile, people moving to the area must wait 10 years before they are eligible to rent an affordable home, with Dales officials saying this was not sustainable and would lead to affordable housing being left empty.

Dales council officials made clear how difficult it is to build affordable housing in the national park and said the system will “break” at some point.

They said it tended to only be small affordable housing schemes which were making the cut – and that affordable housing schemes themselves were rare as a whole – with small schemes proving less financially viable to build.

Officers fear it may become completely financially unviable to find affordable housing in the national park, meaning no available homes for those most in need of support.

This is putting more pressure on the district council to find space for homes and support residents in need of affordable housing, with much of the land effectively deemed not an option, due to it being in the national park.

Paul Wilson, the district council’s chief executive, was one of several key officials to make clear the national park authority needs to make changes in its approach to affordable housing in particular.

The national park is in the process of reviewing its Local Plan, a blueprint for future development.

However, Dales officers feel the current papers published to support the new blueprint do not make housing and sustainable development enough of a priority.

Cllr Mike Ratcliffe said the Peak Park has to “maintain the viability of its villages”, through new housing development.

Officers also said the national park needs to look at the need for affordable housing across its whole patch, as opposed to potentially “cherry-picking” individual sites.

In a report written for last week’s meeting, officers wrote: “Small developments, even on green field sites may not necessarily have an adverse impact upon the character and appearance of the National Park. Housing developments can be accommodated within the park context and can enhance beauty not reduce it.

“This has been demonstrated over 20 years or more in locations such as Winster and Taddington, where the new affordable housing units are exceptional and complement the village rather than detract from it.”

The national park has also suggested that those who would like an affordable home in the Peak District must have a 10-year local connection to the local area. In the past this has been as high as 20 years.

Dales officers pointed out that this is “unduly restrictive and is a disincentive to the provision of additional affordable housing” and suggested five years would be more fair.

Rob Cogings, the Dales’ director of housing, said: “From our experience in the housing team, not enough people remain with the 10-year connection to make developing affordable housing viable.

“A lot of people have actually left the Peak District and in some of these villages we have no affordable housing left at all.

“If we don’t try and reverse that and don’t try and help people that have moved here but have say a three, three-and-a-half, four or four-and-a-half year connection, then we run the risk of new build and existing properties becoming empty and that isn’t going to be sustainable for the community or the housing associations.

“We literally do get calls from people with a nine-years-and-eight-months connection saying ‘when I get to 10 years, will I be eligible?’ and that is the dilemma we are facing on a day-to-day basis.”

Officers also detailed in the report: “The cost of providing new affordable homes has been increasing for many years. There is a danger that slavishly following the design guide, whilst also meeting environmental standards, will mean we reach a point where it is no longer financially viable to provide new affordable homes within the Peak District National Park.

“Grant funding from Homes England, supplemented by grant from local councils and financing from housing associations, cannot keep pace with the relentless increase in build costs.”

Mr Cogings painted a dire picture of the potential future for affordable housing in the Peak District.

He said: “The cost of housing is going up all the time, I think MDF has gone up 62 per cent in the last 12 months, so basic materials are rising at quite a fast rate. You’ve got aspirations of course over land value and all these things are driving cost.”

Mr Cogings said this made it less possible for housing associations to add more energy-saving improvements to homes, such as ground-source heat pumps.

He continued: “Quite often, and what we are finding is the small schemes, where the economies of scale are quite small, you can’t physically get a builder to quote on those prices because they are just so expensive.

“Take Bakewell for example, we have just finished 30-odd homes there and I brought a paper several years ago now asking to put in half a million pounds into that scheme.

“In Tideswell, we are working hard to deliver a scheme for 22 homes and we are being asked to put the same level of investment in to make it work – the figures are going the wrong way.

“It will reach a point where it becomes how much do you put in £1 million to build 20 homes? We will soon run out of money as our own organisation in investing in social housing.

“At some point the system will break, it is not sustainable at the moment to carry on investing at that rate.”

He said he has to consider if he should keep bringing forward plans to put tens of thousands of millions of pounds into affordable housing schemes containing only a small number of homes in communities where the issue is a “real pressure”.

Mr Cogings said this was a “real challenge because we have got no other solution”.

Cllr Dermot Murphy said it was “quite frightening” hearing about the economic difficulties of building homes in the Peak Park.

He said residents want the Peak authority to be more “sympathetic” and make it easier to get planning applications approved, with applications even for a single home proving difficult.

Cllr Murphy said: “They just want some adjustment to allow local young people, young adults to stay in the villages where they grew up.

Cllr Peter O’Brien said the Peak District National Park was not a “holiday park” or a “theme park”, but was “heading that way”.