Partnership means prizes

When public and political opinions combine, they can be a force to be reckoned with - but when it comes to developing housing in villages and market towns, it’s not enough. What you need is partnership - a sense of everyone working together towards the same goals - and that’s exactly what Derbyshire Dales Council and six housing associations have achieved.

Last month, the small rural district council along with Dales Housing, Peak District Rural Housing Association, Equity Housing Group, Westleigh Partnership Homes, Nottingham Community Housing Association, Derwent Living, and the Peak District National Park Authority, won the Development Team of the Year award at Inside Housing and Chartered Institute of Housing’s annual Housing Heroes Awards.

The award judges were struck by the partners’ record of consistently delivering more than 100 new homes a year. Last year they completed 152 new homes, accounting for 34 per cent of all affordable homes built across Derbyshire. This year they are on course to deliver 110. ‘They’re exceptional. I wanted to steal all their ideas for our own organisation,’ said one of the Housing Heroes judges.

Derbyshire Dales gets all of the partners together once every six weeks to concentrate on developing housing. The council itself is not a landlord - in 2002 it transferred its stock to Dales Housing, part of Matlock-based Acclaim Housing Group, now one of the partners. ‘At that point we decided our top priority was delivering more houses,’ says Robert Cogings, head of housing at the council. Politically, this was a popular move. Access to affordable housing is the thing people are most disatifsfied about,’ he says.

There are 2,900 people on the Derbyshire Dales housing register. The council lets properties to 250 of them per year - so at any one time it can only accommodate around 10 per cent of those waiting for housing.

Now, Mr Cogings is in charge of a small team, with only himself and rural housing enabler Isabel Bellamy concentrating on development. ‘It’s our role to enable things to happen as soon as possible, to make it as easy as we can to help people to invest here,’ explains the housing head.
Rural housing enabler.

Since the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs stopped funding RHE roles a couple of years ago, the council, using second homes council tax funding, along with contributions from its housing association partners, has kept the [£40,000 per year (including costs)] position going. In order to make developments happen, the partners must identify housing needs, appraise sites, gain community support and attract investment. Ms Bellamy is the one who starts the ball rolling.

‘People come to us and say, “our village is dying”,’ says Mr Cogings. Although only 3.5 per cent of homes in the Derbyshire Dales district are second homes, when houses do come up for sale they are often bought by ‘in-movers’ as Mr Cogings describes them, which squeezes local people out of the market. The newcomers have often already brought up their families so have no need of the village school, and are likely to shop at a supermarket on their commute home rather than at the local shop, so make less of a contribution to community life, he says.

But the main problem is their impact on housing. If local people are to start their own families in the villages they grew up in, more affordable homes are needed. However, like everywhere else, there are often objections to houses being built on certain pieces of land. To address this issue, Ms Bellamy works with communities to identify sites.

‘She actually walks around the village with local people and a planning officer identifying sites,’ explains Mr Cogings. Possible areas for development are listed in order of preference (see box: A numbers game) and after negotiation with landowners, sites that are available are taken forward.

Earlybird negotiations

Next come early negotiations with parish councils, planning officials at Derbyshire Dales Council and the highways department at the county council. Gerald Taylor, chief executive of Acclaim Group, says that the process means ‘the cogs are well oiled’ by the time proposals reach the later stages. The housing association partners can gauge the kind of schemes that will be supported by planners before they spend money on architects. ‘We don’t have any abortive costs,’ explains Mr Taylor.

Sites that the partners build on are often greenfield land, so gaining planning permission can be tough. It is Ms Bellamy’s job to push developments through and make the whole process as smooth as possible. Armed with evidence proving housing need, she attended 34 parish council meetings last year alone. The whole process usually takes two to three years.

The cost of building in the rural Derbyshire Dales can put developers off - communities are, for instance, unlikely to support the development of homes unless they are built with expensive local Derbyshire stone. But because housing associations in the area are working together, there is no ‘unnecessary competition which potentially risks upping land values,’ says Mr Taylor.

Financial incentives are also on offer: Derbyshire Dales Council has put its own money into developments in order to attract further investment from the Homes and Communities Agency. Since 2002, the local authority has gifted £1.2 million worth of land towards new homes, awarded grants totalling a further £1.2 million, and the HCA has contributed at least £40 million.

HCA funding is probably going to be harder to secure in future, and despite the success of Derbyshire Dales Council and its partners, they still only managed to deliver 55 per cent of the homes needed in the district last year.

Satisfaction

The advantages of its collective full-steam-ahead approach to development, are, however, reflected in feedback from residents in Derbyshire Dales. Ninety one per cent of residents feel that new developments integrated into the village; 93 per cent of tenants who moved into new affordable homes use the local shop weekly and 61 per cent are members of village groups; and all of the parish councils report that they are happy with the process.

The demand for affordable housing in rural Derbyshire is not going to go away - and it’s only through partnership that the local authority and housing associations will get developments off the ground, says Mr Cogings. ‘No one organisation can do it on their own.’

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