Shared ownership is one way to help people onto the housing ladder - Carl Les

We’ve all heard the stories from people we know about how buying a home is just a dream and out of reach for many, especially younger people. We are the European country that is the most committed to the aspiration of home ownership. But this needs to be seen alongside increasingly unaffordable rents in parts of our region which can leave families with little spare money at the end of each month.

And this decline in the number of ‘affordable’ homes has a knock-on effect for many, including towns and villages struggling to keep local services going, such as schools, medical and care services, even demand for the local shop or pub. Businesses struggle to recruit locally. Larger businesses must recruit their workforce from large urban centres some distance away. Small businesses, the mainstay of the North Yorkshire economy, are hindered in their growth potential.

Finding ways for local people to live in their own communities can be complicated, but affordable homes are at the heart of this conundrum and buying a shared ownership home could be the answer for many people who want to stay in our amazing county and are struggling to find a home, and participate in the home-owning aspiration.

Such schemes let people buy a share of their home, anywhere between 10 per cent and 75 per cent, make it more affordable to get onto the property ladder and offer some security in a volatile and unstable housing market.

Buying a share in a home means you will pay a mortgage on the share that you've bought and a below market rent on the percentage you haven’t. The idea behind these schemes is for people to save more money from the reduced rent to buy future further percentages.

Another benefit is only needing to raise a deposit on the share of the home you’re buying, meaning those with less savings have a fighting chance of becoming homeowners.

A huge issue at the moment is the cost of energy. This is not the place to argue how to alter our reliance on external fossil fuels. However the impact is relevant. The fuel poverty gap is almost twice as high in rural areas and many people will speak about the struggle to heat their homes, especially older homes that were not designed with ‘net zero’ in mind, and where retrofitting is both costly and complicated to achieve.

I recently had the privilege to visit a housing scheme in Aiskew, Bedale, to see what is possible when designing and building homes that are affordable, and both energy efficient and net zero ready. This is a partnership between North Yorkshire Council, Broadacres Housing Association and Homes England/ Y&NY Combined Authority. There is the added bonus that in my lifetime of living near there, this is a brownfield site, identified as a priority for redevelopment by NYC, and was formerly a piggery and a redundant chicken hatchery. A real win-win for the community.

The development is a mixture of one, two, three and four-bedroom houses to accommodate a cross-section of the local community with 88 affordable homes for rent and shared ownership, and crucially, because of good design at the right time, all the homes come ‘future proofed’ with air-source heat pumps, enhanced insulation, triple glazing, broadband connections and charging points for electric vehicles. This is a development by a Registered Social Landlord, not a private sector housebuilder, but Broadacres is ahead of the curve. When my son moved to a new well-known builder’s estate outside Newcastle, their properties didn’t even have ducting for the internet, although the next door estate did. Retrofitting was expensive, but there was little differential in house prices between the two.

One new resident, a young mum who grew up in Bedale and now works in the town, said she never expected to have the opportunity to live in a new build home in such a nice area.

This is a great example of why it’s so important to provide high quality, affordable homes for local people. Without those who work and live in our rural communities, small towns and villages, the local economy will struggle and local services may disappear, a hidden form of deprivation.

The most important thing is that those who want to live, work and contribute to our local communities have the choice to do so.

Carl Les is the Leader of North Yorkshire Council.