The challenge of resolving the affordable housing crisis in the Yorkshire Dales has been underlined as a small-scale development was approved after ten years of negotiations.
Members of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority praised both its planning officers and developer Carr and Stocks for reaching a compromise over the greenfield site at the northern end of Giggleswick as they passed a scheme for four affordable and five open market homes.
While community leaders and the park authority has repeatedly sounded a determination to get to grips with the lack of affordable houses for young people and lower paid workers in the park, recent years have seen an increasing number of properties bought as second homes and holiday lets.
Although the authority is looking at introducing numerous measures to increase the availability of housing for local people in its forthcoming Local Plan, members say more affordable housing is urgently needed to keep schools and businesses operating.
A meeting of the authority’s planning committee heard while the site had been made available for development in the park’s 2015-30 Local Plan to provide affordable housing for local people, the cost of developing the site and of creating houses in the national park had led to “a lot of problems in terms of site viability”.
Members were told the applicant had unsuccessfully appealed over a previous proposal to build eight homes on the site off Stackhouse Lane, which did not include any affordable housing, with a planning inspector concluding it would fall significantly short of meeting local housing needs.
The meeting heard by introducing a stipulation that one of the open market properties must be the owner’s principal residency, the developer’s concerns that the venture would be sufficiently profitable had been eased.
However, the amount of land being used for the open market houses on the site remained disproportionate.
As the authority’s current policy enabled developers to provide a sum of money in lieu of building affordable housing, officers said the proposal represented “a real plus” to secure some affordable homes on site alongside a pot of money to spend developing affordable homes elsewhere.
Officers told the meeting: “It’s not ideal, but it’s a good compromise.”
Responding to concerns that the developer could seek to cut the amount of affordable housing after getting planning consent, officers said they believed that was unlikely as it had been through a viability assessment during the appeal process and that it had taken ten years for the proposal to be considered.
Wharfedale councillor Richard Foster said: “I think it’s really good that we’re manage to deliver some affordable housing on this site because previous iterations it’s delivered nothing.”
The authority’s longest serving member Robert Heseltine described the proposal as “excellent” on an “ideal site”.
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