A rural housing training day, provided by Warwickshire Rural Community Council WRCC and Warwickshire Rural Housing Association (WRHA) has helped district and parish councillors and council officers from across Warwickshire understand more about the rural housing enabling and development process.
Rural communities often face extra challenges to get much-needed affordable homes built. And, it’s not just about quantity. For rural communities to flourish, homes need to be high-quality, efficient and affordable. The event, held in early October, was designed to provide insight and inspiration to help councillors and officers recognise the importance of supporting new affordable rural homes and learn about some of these challenges.
Homes for local people
The group were shown two rural schemes in the Stratford-on-Avon villages of Broom and Claverdon. Both schemes already have a successful first phase of affordable homes, and WRHA are due to start a second phase of homes in each village in early in 2025, providing a total of 19 new homes. These homes will be prioritised for people with a connection to the parish, enabling local people to stay in, or return to, their local area.
The Claverdon scheme will provide 10 new affordable homes – four for social rent and six for shared ownership. The scheme in Broom will provide 18 new homes – six for social rent and three for shared ownership – as well as nine much-needed affordable properties, which are a mix of houses, maisonettes and bungalows.
Spacious and low-carbon affordable homes
In both schemes, the homes will be built to national space standards and will have energy-efficient air source heat pumps and solar PV panels with battery storage. The air source heat pumps are eco-friendly, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and also provide lower cost heating, compared to traditional electric heating systems found in many off-gas rural homes. This will help to keep energy bills low for residents, which in times of significant energy cost increases, is more important than ever to help challenge fuel poverty. Read more
Download WRCC’s Rural Housing Enabler, Sarah Brooke Taylor’s presentation: Bringing local connection affordable homes to rural communities
Find out more about the Rural Housing Enabler Programme as well as Housing Needs Surveys, an essential step for parish and town councils to udnertake in order to detemine need.
A Community Right to Build Order is a type of Neighbourhood Development Order and forms one of the neighbourhood planning tools introduced in the Localism Act 2011. It can be used to grant outline or full planning permission for specific development which complies with the order, such as homes, shops, businesses, affordable housing for rent or sale, community facilities or playgrounds. Find out more about the Community Right to Build as well as affordable and community-led housing from MyCommunity.