Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2012/January 2013 | Page 132

PROPERTY

Property issues with Richard Dickson of Hose Rhodes & Dickson

BYO - future of housing
BYO…no, not ‘bring your own’
but ‘build your own’! It’s a concept
which I believe will form an integral
part of the future of housing and
construction industries, provided
planning departments both locally
and nationally adopt a forward
thinking approach.
In our current straitened financial
climate, one of the few things all
economists agree upon is that a
house building programme would
be one of the best ways of reviving
the wider economy. In addition to
providing housing for the country’s
swelling population there would
also be an enormous employment
benefit, with the national creation
of up to 300,000 jobs.
A failure to build enough new
homes has pushed up rents and
house prices, and resulted in an
86 per cent increase in housing
benefit claims since 2009 by those
in employment (National Housing
Federation (NHF) statistics).
In order to mitigate the ever
spiralling costs to the taxpayer
and kick start financial growth
we need to join with the NHF in
urging the Government to take a
‘long-term joined up approach’ and
consider measures such as releasing
publicly owned brownfield land for
development by housing associations.
A key measure will be the release
of land, publicly or privately owned,
for self-build schemes. This is an
idea which has recently received high
level backing, at least in part, from
the Queen, who wants to allow land
at Balmoral to be used for low cost
properties, to help local people climb a
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rung on to the housing ladder.
In order to keep costs down, the
idea behind the scheme is for the
houses to be part built by families,
and it is hoped it will demonstrate
how self-built homes can increase the
supply of housing more widely for
people in rural communit