Rising house prices in the English countryside have pushed more than half a million people into renting over the past decade, a new report has found.
A 19% increase in rural renting has outpaced rises in London and England’s other cities, says local authorities’ group, the County Councils Network. It says house prices in rural counties are the most unaffordable outside London at an average of £309,000. The government says it is committed to creating a fair housing system. In the Cotswolds, which has long attracted the wealthy and famous, locals like Sophie Brown are finding they have been priced out of the property market. Sophie, who is renting affordable housing in her home village of North Cerney, told the BBC that if she had bought locally it would have cost her around half a million pounds – “standard for the Cotswolds”. “I was lucky to get this property,” she said. “A lot of people are coming from London with their second homes and you’ve got people like celebrities that are moving into the area and pricing out the normal everyday person with a normal job. “Local people are having issues trying to buy houses. I think the majority of people are living at home longer, which has its challenges, and a lot of people are in rented accommodation and potentially people are in sub-standard accommodation because they can’t afford to have a decent place to live.” It is a region-wide situation that Gloucester Rural Community Council (GRCC), which helped Sophie find her home, has been dealing with. Cara Loukes, the GRCC’s affordable housing manager, said holiday lettings and second-home buying had seen many landlords take properties out of the longer-term private rental sector. That in turn has seen “more and more people need to move onto council waiting lists” while it was taking years for new affordable rental homes to be developed. For local people on lower incomes the options were limited, Ms Loukes said. “You will probably need to rely on friends and family, possibly sofa-surfing, inappropriate rentals – people are living in caravans, insecure housing, garages – or hoping eventually for affordable housing to come through,” she explained. If the situation is not tackled, Ms Loukes warned, “communities will die, socio-economically”.
