Around 8.5m people in England are not able to access the housing they need – and a significant proportion of those affected live in rural areas.
In the towns and villages that pepper the valleys and hills of rural Shropshire and Herefordshire – where our housing association, Connexus, operates – the lack of good-quality affordable housing is having a profound effect.
There are more than 3,500 households waiting for accommodation on housing waiting lists in Shropshire alone, and with the countryside charity CPRE reporting that it would take 82 years for the 300,000 people waiting for social housing in the countryside to be offered a home at current building rates.
If this issue is not addressed, it could turn once vibrant communities into out-of-season ghost towns, with local people moving away to more affordable areas as they have been leaving coastal locations over the past decade or so.
Affordability and maintenance present key challenges
The UK government's new target of 1.5m new homes over the course of this parliament will make a difference, and represents a good start. But as well as making sure we have enough skilled labour to build them, we need to be mindful of where these homes are built.
In rural areas, only around 9% of existing homes are classified as affordable housing. With the waiting lists for social housing in the hundreds of thousands, there is a clear and demonstrable need that is not being met.
To address the shortfall, we desperately need rural areas to be given proportional grant funding with that provided to urban areas. Any funding also needs to reflect the true cost of developing and maintaining rural homes, with labour and materials often pricier because of difficulties in access and lack of infrastructure.
When it comes to maintaining homes there, is a further challenge. Connexus's stock is on average nearly 70 years old, and it's a similar story for many other rural associations. This contrasts with those with stock in urban centres, who have been able to build at scale more easily and replace older stock year on year.
This is because planning tends to move more quickly in towns and cities, where building upwards is more straightforward. In smaller towns and villages, developments must take into account local character, with specific requirements around design and scale making the planning process more onerous.
Land too is often underused, with a recent study finding just 17% of planning authorities using rural exception sites.
Effective retrofitting requires costly upgrades
Bringing older rural affordable homes up to modern standards of energy efficiency can be complex as well – it isn't as simple as changing old heating systems for new.
To retrofit systems such as air- or ground-source heat pumps effectively, the entire envelope of the building often has to be revisited, otherwise efficiency gains cannot be made. This can involve invasive work, capping chimneys and taking homes back to the brick before encasing them in new, thermally efficient skins.
In Shropshire, where Connexus has been carrying out large-scale refurbishment work to resolve damp and mould in semi-detached housing built in the 1930s, each home has cost around £125,000 to achieve an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of C.
Doing this at scale across the association's operating area would currently be prohibitively costly, and highlights the need for specific and targeted funding.
Lower energy bills help redress rural premium
Although projects such as this have been challenging and disruptive, the benefits are significant for residents and will help future residents too.
Importantly, it will mean lower energy bills as prices continue to rise. This is of course welcome during a cost-of-living crisis – a problem compounded because those living in rural areas have to pay more for the same goods and services than those living in urban areas.
A paper from the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Rural Business and the Rural Powerhouse showed that this rurality premium can be as much as 10%–20%. When coupled with lower-than-average wages, it makes living and working in rural communities significantly more challenging.
By increasing the supply of new-build properties and keeping existing homes energy-efficient, we can start to close that gap.
Investment and public services crucial to communities
It will take wider cooperation to bring costs down further. For instance, investment in infrastructure, including connectivity, can play a part, enabling people to work from where they grew up rather than having to move away and take their families with them.
It's also about making sure that vital services such as schools and accessible healthcare remain available in remote places, and where possible this means working to combine local resources from the public and private sectors, such as sharing buildings or facilities, or supporting the delivery of community services from agencies in schemes and homes.
This is an approach that Connexus has been working on with our partners for a while, one example being the delivery of support services for older people and those with additional needs by a specialist external care provider which is based in one of our schemes in Herefordshire.
This creates familiarity and trust with our partners delivering the service, as well as improving speed and quality of care. But the approach needs stronger backing at both a local and national level to maximise its impact.
If we can bring in additional investment for homes and work smarter together, then we may see our rural communities begin to bounce back. However, if we continue to ignore the issue or to focus on easier ways to meet housing targets in urban areas, by building skywards or focusing on scale, then we'll lose large parts of our heritage and all that goes with it.