Housing shortages and high prices in the UK have pushed the Government to respond with an ambitious building programme. £3.3 billion of public money has been set aside for affordable housing over the next three years, with more to follow.
However, more importantly, the Government has set planning requirements for developers to deliver quality housing at affordable prices. This means that in the county of Denbighshire, any project over a certain size will be required to incorporate homes for the social and low cost housing sector.
The opportunities for you to profit from this building boom are huge. But funding relies on meeting rising sustainability targets and even tougher RSL requirements, quality and efficient construction methods.
When applying for Planning Permission it is important that you complete the Affordable Housing Questionnaire at the initial stage of your programme.
The Planning Authority will give preference to all applications which are accompanied by the Affordable Housing Questionnaire. This will save time and money and hopefully speed up the process of your application as any problems will be highlighted and rectified at the start of the project.
Please be aware: Any application which does not include the questionnaire may take more time to process.
The Supplementary Planning Guidance gives all the information you should need and a link is provided below.
Denbighshire County Council has adopted Supplementary Planning Guidance (SPG), to address a lack of affordable local housing throughout the County and to reflect Policy HSG 10 of the Unitary Development Plan. This follows on from a Housing Needs Assesment carried on behalf of the Council by Fordham Research.
The Guidance, which will particularly help first time buyers for those living in both urban and rural areas, requires developers to provide approximately 30% of dwellings on all new housing developments to be affordable to local people. Following approval by Full Council in June 2007 eligible affordable households need to demonstrate a genuine local connection. The local connections policy and accompanying criteria set out the various tests and definitions to access new properties provided through the planning system.
The Guidance was in draft form for eight months, during which time it was subject to extensive consultation, including residents of Denbighshire, and local and national house builders. The Guidance was approved in July 2005 and has already been identified as an example of best practice in the Welsh Assembly Government's recently published 'Affordable Housing Toolkit'.
Since the county introduced a draft affordable housing policy in July 2004, planning consent has been given for 213 affordable units. Of these approximately 127 will be mainly built for first time buyers over the course of the next five years.
To date the Council has negotiated discounts of up to 43% off the open market value of properties for sale, to make them affordable for local people. The first affordable house was completed in Ruthin in May 2006.
To assist developers with development proposals we have developed a guidance note.
This should be used in preparing planning applications. The application itself should be supported by a completed questionnaire with accompanying notes.
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