Villages ‘risk further drain of young people’ unless jobs and homes can be found

The study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests that the availability of social housing varies widely in rural areas - even between neighbouring villages. The communities with the best supply of affordable homes for rent, ironically, tend to be those with the greatest concentrations of poverty and unemployment, such as former mining villages.

The report also highlights the mixed implications of planning conditions that require new social housing in villages to be used to alleviate local needs. While restrictions on occupancy may be popular with local people, they create inflexibility for housing associations in finding tenants and have the potential to deter private investors.

The research, undertaken at the University of Newcastle, analysed national data on rural housing markets in England and interviewed housing association providers and tenants in five contrasting case study areas. The researchers also found that:

• Tenants were generally very satisfied with their homes and felt that renting from rural housing associations met their needs more effectively than other housing alternatives. The opportunity to maintain family and neighbour networks was the clearest benefit identified by tenants who had connections with the locality.
• Benefits in terms of links to employment were less obvious. This was partly because tenants accepted the need to commute as a normal feature of living in rural areas. But a small number had been prevented from making a work-related move to another village because housing association allocations gave priority to people with a local connection.
• An analysis of ‘life chances’ and the factors making it more likely that young people and other residents would leave rural communities showed that while the provision of affordable housing was highly significant, there also had to be jobs available.
• Young people from all types of rural area were more likely to have left their parents’ homes by their early 20s than those who grew up in towns and cities. Those from rural areas where social housing was least scarce were most likely to have set up on their own, but the overall picture was of an ever-increasing flow of young people from the countryside into urban areas.

Stuart Cameron of Newcastle University, one of the report’s authors, said: “Our work shows that people need to have affordable housing for several different reasons and its provision can play an important role in improving quality of life. If social housing is scarce or absent, then villages risk losing their remaining young people and less affluent families, particularly in much of southern England where affordability is such an acute problem.”

He added: “The overall effect of the ‘local need’ conditions that planners commonly attach to social housing developments in villages can be unfair. Greater flexibility could be achieved through a ‘cascade’ system where vacancies could first be offered within the village, but then to a wider cluster of villages and, eventually, to the district as a whole.”