The Government announced the delivery of its Manifesto commitment to establish an Affordable Rural Housing Commission (ARHC), which will be chaired by the former Channel Four News political editor Elinor Goodman.
The new commission to identify better access to affordable housing in rural areas represents a Government shift after repeated warnings from the Government's rural watchdog, the Countryside Agency, of housing shortages in the countryside. The commission will look at ways of increasing the supply of much-needed homes in rural areas, and will report in March 2006.
One issue to be considered by the ARHC is the impact of the Right to Buy scheme, which critics claim is the biggest threat to affordable housing provision in rural areas.
The ARHC inquiry comes at a time of increasing concern that proposed changes to the planning system will allow more green area land to be released for house building.
Elinor Goodman left Channel Four after 22 years there. She lives in Wiltshire and is a former trustee of the Wiltshire Community Foundation, a charity that tackles rural isolation in the county. Once the ARHC concludes its work, she will sit on the Board of the Countryside Agency.
Nine organisations/consortia were invited to go on to the final stage of the Design for Manufacture competition.
The competition, which is organised by English Partnerships, takes forward the Government's challenge to demonstrate that high-quality homes can be designed for a construction cost of around £60,000. The nine finalists will now bid to develop homes on one or more of ten public sector owned sites. A further seven entrants received a commendation for their entries.
Those invited to go on to the final stage were:
The commended bidders were Accent Group, GENTECT Homes, Linden Homes, Persimmon, Taylor Woodrow Developments Ltd., The Forward Group, and The Super E(r) Partnership.
The competition is set to create around 1,000 homes across 10 public sector owned sites. They will be a mix of different types of dwellings, including homes for sale and rent. About a third of the homes will be made available for first-time buyers. The winners of the competition are expected to be announced by the end of the year, with construction of the first homes starting in Spring 2006.
An online exhibition, launched to enable members of the public to view the winning and commended stage designs, invites feedback. View the exhibition at www.designformanufacture.info.
Three new employee groups were added to the list of eligible keyworkers who can be assisted under the Keyworker Living Programme. They are (subject to criteria) Thames Valley Police, British Transport Police, and local authority care nurses.
The proportion of new homes built on brownfield sites has reached an all-time record level of 70%, which is up from 56% in 1997. Meanwhile, the average density of new homes development has increased nationally to 40dph (dwellings per hectare), up from 25dph in 1997.
A former hospital in Hampshire was identified as the first site for so-called fast-track housing. English Partnerships hopes that work will soon start on more than 1,000 homes around the former Park Prewett Hospital in Basingstoke, marking the start of plans to use 66 former NHS sites around the country for affordable housing.
MoD land, such as the former RAF staff college at Bracknell, has also been identified for affordable housing development - some of which will be used to provide key worker homes.
The Welsh Assembly Government announced a package of measures aimed at helping local authorities provide more affordable housing. The measures include changes to planning policy and guidance to increase the quantity of affordable housing provided through the planning system. The package also includes an Affordable Housing Toolkit, which brings together in one reference document all the mechanisms available to local authorities and their partners to increase the supply of affordable housing.
In addition, there is a Local Housing Assessment Guide, which will provide a common system for all authorities to use when calculating their overall housing requirements. It will also help authorities judge how much affordable housing they need to provide.
English Partnerships launched a new brochure, Hospital Sites Programme. It sets out details of the newly announced programme and the role of the Agency in making the best use of the surplus public sector land recently transferred to it from the NHS. The brochure can be downloaded at www.englishpartnerships.co.uk/publications.
Milton Keynes Partnership (MKP) released planning consent for 1,400 homes at Broughton Gate on the east of Milton Keynes. The consent was a UK first with the developer agreeing to trail blaze an infrastructure tariff - a new form of section 106 agreement that will help fund the infrastructure needed for growth.
Milton Keynes is the first area in the UK to seek enhanced contributions from developers through an infrastructure tariff at a fixed rate, as a new means of ensuring long-term funding. MKP will facilitate the timely construction of local and strategic infrastructure and then collect payments from the developers. It hopes to roll out the process across the whole of the Urban Development Area and seek similar contributions from developers of over 15,000 new homes.
The National Housing Federation announced it would investigate the barriers preventing associations from providing sufficient levels of accessible housing suitable for wheelchairs. The decision came in the wake of a report from the National Disabled Persons Housing Service, which found that few associations keep records of the requirements for accessible housing and the provision of new homes built to wheelchair standards is falling well below set targets.