The Burpham Community Association's submission of 4 November 2002 explains the reasons for our opposition to the proposal contained within the Surrey County Council Draft Spatial Strategy for the provision of 6,000 additional homes on three new sites in the Guildford area.

  This supplementary submission deals with the question of low-cost "affordable" housing in the Guildford area and urges that ways should be found to facilitate the construction of such housing.

  Whilst this Association is opposed to the provision of housing in the volume and manner proposed by the Surrey County Council, members accept that there is an urgent need to provide additional low-cost housing, preferably on brown field sites, for essential, modestly paid, "key workers" such as teachers, nurses, local government staff, police and others who maintain our essential local services. Guildford, in common with much of the South East of England, is an area where the cost of housing is prohibitively high and where there is an acute shortage of housing for sale at a price that "key workers" can afford. This results in great difficulty for employers, both in terms of recruitment and retention of such staff, which is one of the reasons why local services are under such acute strain.

  It appears to members of this Association that at present, in the absence of adequate funding, the only "policy" seems to be to try to persuade developers to provide a proportion of low-cost housing as part of housing development schemes for which they are awarded planning consent. We understand that experience has shown that a ratio of only about 25% low-cost housing is possible in this way and then only on large developments in excess of 2,000 properties.

  If this principle were applied to the three new developments in the Guildford area, totalling some 6,000 new homes, as proposed by Surrey County Council in their Draft Spatial Strategy, it would result in the provision of only 1,500 low cost "affordable" houses. However, developers would, in turn, be permitted to build 4,500 more expensive homes. This Association would submit that this more expensive property is not needed or required in the Guildford area, indeed, if it were provided it would simply aggravate the need for more low-cost housing and compound all the other environmental problems outlined in our previous submission.

  We understand that the local planning authority is considering seeking a level of 50% low-cost housing provision in any planning applications for major new housing development in this locality. However, developers will also be expected to finance vital and substantial infrastructure provision as planning "gain". Members of this Association therefore believe that the proposals will fail as the laws of profit and loss dictate that you cannot have both a reasonable level affordable housing provision (let alone the 50% being spoken of) and the essential infrastructure provision all financed from the same source—the developers profit!

  This Association's submission of 4 November argues that alternative strategies are needed to deal with the problem of housing for key workers. Two possibilities might be:

—  it is understood that, in our case, Guildford Borough Council is holding some £30 million derived from the sale of council houses over a number of years, which they, like local government generally, are precluded from using by Government rules. This money could and should be released for use locally to finance new low-cost "affordable" housing for key workers, either through housing associations or tenant partnerships created for the purpose.

—  Alternatively, additional funds should be provided centrally to finance low-cost housing and made available through the Housing Corporation.

Graham Hardy

Chairman

Burpham Community Association

8 November 2002