The Village Affordable Housing Handbook has two parts:
The Website Pages – make up the body of Handbook and can be navigated like any website via the titles at the top of the page and the other links
The Sustainability Tool – a spreadsheet which is the core of the Community & Sustainability Impact Assessments
Overview of the Handbook
Our countryside needs more homes that people can afford to live in and to own. This need is particularly acute in smaller rural settlements (those with populations of less than 3000 people) where housing stock is limited and constraints on new development have contributed to an imbalance in the type, size and cost of housing that is available.
This Handbook has been produced to help planners and local people work together to secure the new affordable housing that their communities need. It does this by providing a tool which can be used to assess the sustainability of rural communities and the contribution that new affordable housing can make to enhance their sustainability in the future.
The Handbook is based on extensive research of current policy and practice, and has been tested with communities, Local Planning Authorities, planning and housing practitioners. It is designed for use by planners and to support collaborative working between planners and communities, landowners and developers, social landlords and local councillors.
Its starting point is that all rural communities, no matter how small or remote, have the potential to become more sustainable, either as individual settlements, or as part of a group.
What the Handbook is for
This Handbook is designed to help planners and communities better understand the impacts of the provision of new affordable housing in small rural settlements. It is provided to help people make a case for, and demonstrate the positive impacts of, affordable housing. It does this in a number of ways:
- It provides information on the contribution that affordable housing makes to the sustainability of small rural communities
- It provides information on how to plan positively for small rural settlements, and critically;
- It provides a sustainability assessment tool which can be used to:
- assess the current sustainability of a community
- assess the impact of development proposals on the future sustainability of a community
- assess the future sustainability needs of a community.
The assessment tool can be used to help determine planning applications, to inform the development of a Neighbourhood Plan, as a design aid for community right to build schemes or for strategic plan making.
How to use the Handbook
The full structure of the Handbook is shown in below. All of its sections are linked through the titles at the top of each page, but if you get lost you can use the links below to go to any part of the tool. Although the handbook is written for a wide audience some technical terms are used. These are defined in the Glossary.
Acknowledgements
This Handbook was commissioned as part of the Defra funded Rural Affordable Housing project delivered by the Homes and Communities Agency.
The Handbook has been produced by a team led by Rural Innovation and comprising:
- c4g
- Rural Housing Solutions
- Rose Regeneration
They have worked with a Steering Group comprising officers from the Homes and Communities Agency, the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs and the Department for Communities and Local Government.
The design and development of the Handbook has been supported by many rural planning and housing practitioners. We are grateful to those local planning authorities which helped to test the Handbook and to the Local Government Improvement and Development who hosted the Affordable Rural Housing Community of Practice whose members also contributed extensively.
The handbook is advisory and does not constitute Government policy.