The Cumbrian Housing Strategy was launched yesterday. 70 Cumbrian movers, shakers, politicians, builders and social landlords all discussing our counties housing crisis.
Our crisis is not unique, although our County certainly is!
Can there be anywhere else in the UK with such extremes of beauty alongside poverty and wealth alongside great need. We have mining villages with no mines and precious little else. We have the great shipbuilding town of Barrow with the ever present threat of having no ships to build. The City of Carlisle with it's great history and heritage and in the middle of all this there is the Lake District National Park. Seen by some as the saviour of Cumbria and by others as its nemesis
Cumbria has some wonderful communities whether in those old pit villages of the West Coast or their farming equivalents in sparsely populated Eden and South Lakeland. Our County has always attracted artists, writers, thinkers and you'll often see professors conversing with farmhands at the local village hall. But this very diversity also reflects the diversity of its problems.
Cumbria surely is unique in that it contains every housing challenge in just one county of half a million souls? Our housing strategy attempts to deal with these challenges.
Cumbria's new housing strategy has three key themes:
Growth: In common with most areas we just don't have enough homes to meet our needs. And in common with other areas of natural beauty we have a retired population who will scream blue murder if any kind of development is proposed anywhere near them. These areas also have a low waged economy being too dependent upon tourism and agriculture leading to a house price multiplier of approaching 15 times annual income. Even professionals on £30,000 p.a. struggle when prices head towards £200,000 for a basic home.
Yet houses can be built for around £80,000 for that same basic home, the high prices are a function of supply and demand and we need to increase supply. We have the builders, the problem is we don't have enough land available.
Well we do actually, we have Acres, Hectares, Square Miles, whatever measure you happen to use we have lots of it. We just need to have the political will to allocate enough land for housing. Clearly the Central Lakes does deserve a measure of protection but outside the park there is no shortage of suitable building land.
Support: Put aside the chocolate box images and look beyond the cottage gardens of Cumbria. You will find 90 year olds living alone in unsuitable accommodation, just a short step away from needing residential care. Living in the countryside is a great dream but what happens when those twee little stone steps become the final trip that kills you? And when you can no longer go foraging for wood to fuel that lovely wood burner and have to fill your oil tank at over £1,000 a time? Cumbria doesn't have enough extra care sheltered homes and our demographics show that it's going to get worse - much much worse. In our more deprived areas (and we have plenty of those) it's often the young that suffer. No jobs locally and not enough education or ambition to move away, drink, drugs and an aimless life can all too often become the norm. Good quality supported can play a major part in stopping this decline.
Renewal: New homes are visible and everyone can see where the moneys gone. Improving existing homes is just as vital. Fuel poverty is a real problem in our County with old stone built houses having poor insulation and many relying on heating oil or bottled gas. And in some areas we still have houses which really do need to be demolished and rebuilt to better standards.
Growth, Support and Renewal. They are our three themes and yesterday I spoke to 70 people who are capable of making it happen. 70 people who are being held back by the fragmented nature of Cumbria's politics, an antiquated planning system, a collapsed financial sector and the almost total lack of government funding.
But those 70 people are going out there to do their level best to solve at least some of these problems. They know that Cumbria needs them and they will work tirelessly to help our County move forward.
I'm proud to be a Cumbrian!
The Cumbrian Housing Strategy can be found here: http://www.lakedistrict.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/169040/2011_10_26_the_cumbria_housing_strategy_and_investment_plan_2011-2015_annex_1.pdf