Housing crisis report welcomed by South Shropshire Lib Dems

A new report ‘Unravelling a crisis: the state of rural affordable housing in England’ highlights major challenges for Shropshire’s rural communities today. The report - by the countryside charity CPRE - identifies three major problems. 

Firstly, people are being driven out of the countryside by record house prices, low wages and a proliferation of second homes and short-term lets. Secondly, homelessness is up 40% since 2018 in rural England, where the average house price is now £419,000. And thirdly, 300,000 people are waiting for social housing in rural England, a backlog that would take 89 years to clear at current rates of construction. 

The report continues: 'There is an extreme disparity between rural house prices, which are higher than those in other parts of the country, and rural wages, which are much lower. House prices in the countryside increased at close to twice the rate of those in urban areas in the five years to 2022. While the average cost of a home jumped 29% and is now £419,000, rural earnings increased by just 19% to a total of £25,600.'

Lib Dem Chris Naylor, South Shrops Parliamentary Candidate, who spent four years in charge of 20,000 local authority homes, was invited to Tuesday's House of Lords launch and said "All of us who work with rural communities know this is a serious problem. Rural young adults now find it very hard to find homes in the communities they grew up in. Many are forced to live in urban centres miles away, commuting long distances to work. Which means those rural communities sadly lose the vital social mix of young and old living in the same place.” 

CPRE Chief Executive Roger Mortlock said: "Decades of inaction have led to an affordable housing crisis that is ripping the soul from our rural communities. Solutions do exist and the next government must set and deliver ambitious targets for new, genuinely affordable and social rented rural housing. Record house prices and huge waiting lists for social housing are driving people out of rural communities, contributing to soaring levels of often hidden rural homelessness. Urgent change is required to ensure we don’t end up with rural communities that are pricing out the very people needed to keep them vibrant.”

North Shrops Lib Dem Helen Morgan MP, who championed a motion for more social housing at the recent Lib Dem Conference, and Lib Dem peer Baroness Pinnock, who grew up in Ditton Priors, also attended.