Farming in the Uplands - ARCHIVE: Defra

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee: Evidence Ev 25
10 November 2010 Dr Andrew Clark, Will Cockbain, William Worsley and Professor Allan Buckwell
will improve or worsen the situation regarding
affordable housing in the uplands?
William Worsley: I think it will help, but I do not
think it is the sole answer. We are sceptical about 90%
support. The planning system is in a pretty good mess.
One of the ways of looking at the uplands is to
consider the planning system and what can be done to
enable that. I think affordable housing in the uplands,
particularly in areas of national parks, is extremely
important. The home on the farm concept that has
been brought forward is a starter. However, my
concern is that the cost of converting redundant
buildings to provide affordable housing is too great.
You have to look at appropriately designed new build
housing. I am talking here about the importance of
design. If you build in the local vernacular to an
appropriate style and design it can fit in very well to
our uplands where landscape is often very important.
I think that planning needs to create opportunities in
the uplands, in exactly the same way as in rural
lowland Britain, to enable farmers and upland land
managers to diversify in an appropriate way with
appropriately designed buildings.
Will Cockbain: I agree with everything William has
said. When it comes to planning, greater flexibility is
required, but we need a system that actively
encourages generation overlap. There are lots of
benefits from generation overlap not just to do with
farming. Quite often a young man might leave school
and work part-time perhaps on his father’s farm for a
couple of days a week and help out on one or two
other farms. When that guy reaches 22, 23 or 24 and
decides to get married he cannot afford to live in the
area. Off he goes and takes with him his rural skills.
If there was a system in place that gave reasonable
security to young men or women that they would be
allowed to build or convert a house or whatever within
the parameters of the farmstead, and so would be
allowed to live in the area in which they were born
and brought up, they would start to think how else to
generate some income. If they are allowed to live
there they need to earn more money. Therefore, you
start to foster entrepreneurial skills.
Where you have a farm that is one labour unit on the
farming side, that farm will function much better in
every way possible when there are two people on it
because it gives them time off; it means they can look
at other interests or aspects of the business to
diversify. There are also lots of social benefits. You
have farmers and their wives in their sixties or
seventies who are approaching the time when they
may need some sort of assistance. Where you have
encouraged generation overlap they will look after
themselves; they become a little community, and that
takes a great burden off the state. You have a younger
person who can nip to the shops if someone is not
well. There is a whole range of social benefits.
When speaking to Tim Farron years ago I used to say
you could not refer to farmsteads as greenfield sites,
nor perhaps should you refer to them as brownfield
sites; they should be called beigefield sites. You
already have a cluster of buildings; from a visual
aspect it is already there. What you need is a mindset
that instead of needing an incredibly good reason to
be allowed to do anything there, the planning
authorities need an incredibly good reason for not
allowing them to do something. You would then be
surprised what would happen. It would strengthen the
businesses in all sorts of ways and help socially and in
terms of welfare; people would look after themselves,
families and child care. It would help in all sorts of
ways. The key to it is flexible planning.
William Worsley: To develop that, we have touched
on issues to do with succession and everything else.
Something that really could be done to improve it is
to follow the Welsh with PPS7. They have something
called TAN6 (Technical Advisory Note 6) that enables
the building of a dwelling on the farm to enable
succession to take place. But it needs to be
appropriate. We need to look at it more flexibly, and
that would be one way to manage succession issues.
Very often you have a farmer sitting in the farmhouse
and becoming more elderly and the younger
generation cannot get back on to the farm and deal
with the succession because there is nowhere for them
to go and live. If England can follow the Welsh lead
here that would be a significant step forward. We
welcomed TAN6 when it was announced in July as a
really good move forward.
Q111 Mrs Glindon: You think it will be better if
there is flexibility?
William Worsley: Yes. What is really important about
development in rural areas, particularly the uplands,
is that in most cases they are of very significant
landscape quality. The most important thing we do
here is that anything that is done should be good
quality design. If you get the design right an awful lot
can be done to help develop the countryside. That is
the key point. It would be absolutely awful to see a
lot of urban-style boxes built on farms that would be
inappropriate for that location, but if we build
appropriately in those locations we can do a lot to free
up the system.
Chair: Is it just as affordable?
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Q112 Mrs Glindon: How can you link quality to
affordability? That is the issue, isn’t it?
William Worsley: This is a really important one. The
first comment about “affordable” is that people think
about building as cheaply as possible. I hope that the
CLA will hold a design competition in the next year
about how to do affordable housing to high quality
design, but affordable housing does not necessarily
mean cheap housing. We do not want to spoil the
countryside just to build cheap houses; we need to
find a way to build inexpensive houses to a quality
that the occupant is proud of and can enjoy living
in, and can be beneficial rather than detrimental to
that location.
It is also about the social aspect of building affordable
housing. One of the problems with the post-war
council house building boom was that effectively
urban houses were built in rural areas, usually in
locations on the edges of villages. To this day they are
referred to in villages as “the council houses” and the
people who live there have never really been
integrated into the villages. I am afraid that still tends
to be the case 50, 60 years on. If we can build
affordable houses that look like any other houses—so