Overview
Cornwall Council has been supporting community-led housing since its inception as a unitary authority in 2009. It does so in a number of different ways:
- A supportive Planning policy - the Local Plan encourages community-led development, with a focus on community-led and exception site developments, as well as Community Land Trusts . This is also backed by a Supplementary Planning Document on affordable housing which specifically supports such schemes to meet local housing needs
- Providing enabling support - the Council’s Affordable Housing Team has considerable experience in enabling and supporting community groups to provide their own homes. It has recently recruited a dedicated Rural Housing Enabler - the first in the County since 2009 – using its Community Housing Fund allocation
- Partnerships with external delivery bodies - the Council has an important working relationship with several external organisations involved in community-led housing development, including Cornwall Rural Housing Association and Cornwall Community Land Trust, which it helped to establish in 2006. More than 200 community-led homes have already been provided through partnership working
- Co-ordinating a pipeline of sites - the Council is proactively coordinating a pipeline of sites for affordable housing by monitoring the planning process. It intends to extend this approach in the future to the purchase of sites, passing them onto external developers, including community-led, to facilitate the provision of more affordable homes. The Council has also established a £1 million Site Remediation Fund, specifically for community-led housing schemes, to unlock poor quality brownfield sites and buildings with high development costs
- Providing revenue funding - the Council is providing revenue funding to build capacity in Cornwall Community Land Trust and Cornwall Rural Housing Association, both of whom are experts in community-led housing delivery. It also funds technical and early stage development work for specific schemes that would otherwise be unlikely to proceed
- Providing capital funding - the Council has used part of its £5.1 million Community Housing Fund allocation for 2016/17 to part fund the development costs of 34 affordable community-led homes, brought forward by Cornwall Community Land Trust and developed and owned by Registered Provider development partners. It also has a long-standing £4 million Revolving Loan Fund which provides gap funding at low interest rates specifically for community-led schemes
Useful links
Cornwall Council’s Housing Delivery Manager is Sam.irving@cornwall.gov.uk
Cornwall Rural Housing Association website.
Cornwall CLT website.
Published in April 2018
