Devon Housing Commission: How do you tackle a region’s housing crisis?

The Devon Housing Commission has been set up to develop recommendations to start to address the broken housing markets across Devon.

The initiative, which is chaired by Lord Best and was established last summer by the Devon Housing Task Force, a partnership between the eleven local authorities across Devon, Plymouth and Torbay – and supported by the University of Exeter, is due to report back in July.

Next month, attendees at The Housing Forum’s Exeter event will given an early insight into the challenges faced by councils, the role of the commission and how this helps to involve wider stakeholders

Matt Dodd, head of Devon Housing Commission, spoke to Jordan Marshall ahead of the event.

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your role and how you sort of got to where you are today?

I am currently leading work on the Devon Housing Commission, which is the commission chaired by Lord Best. I’m working for the University of Exeter, and I’m on secondment Holmes England, where I’ve had most of my career in housing.

I worked for the Housing Corporation, Homes and Communities Agency and then Homes England in various roles. These include delivery roles and investment management roles working with affordable housing providers.

I’ve also found a bit of a niche around rural housing, and community led housing, so I led some of the agency’s approaches on that. Previous to that I had worked at Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs for a minister.

At the Development Partnership Forum the Devon Housing Commission is set to share some of its early insights. Can you tell me some of those early thoughts?

Firstly, I think a little background on the housing commission itself is important. It was set up by something called the Devon Housing Task Force, which is a group of local politicians. Devon is complicated in its local structure, it’s still two tier. So you’ve got the districts and then you’ve got Torbay as a unitary authority, and then you’ve got the county over the top. And - the one thing that all the districts do agree on - is that in the county there is a housing crisis.

So, a group of local politicians formed the task force and one of the things they wanted to do was get a commission together to look at some of those challenges. They essentially wanted us to go through, and  build a picture of what’s actually going on in Devon. When you’ve got lots of districts and the county it is sometimes difficult to gather that picture together in a consistent way.

The commission was asked to look at some ways that we could address those challenges on a local level, and also what things need to happen on a national level as Devon has a lot of the same problems as lots of other areas. But in some cases, these problems are more extreme.

We’ll be reporting in July. to the Devon Housing Task Force and we’ll be holding a launch event where we do that. We’ve held six meetings, and we’ve gone around to different places. We’ve been to Exeter where we’ve looked at some of the challenges delivering housing in Exeter, we’ve been to student housing and brownfield development. We’ve been to the South Hams to look at rural housing, rural homelessness, and national parks because they’re obviously a feature in Devon.

We’ve been up to North Devon to look at things like coastal communities in Ilfracombe, some of the links between health and housing and some of the difficulties faced when you have things like a holiday lets and second homes, and we’re going to Torbay to look at regeneration of a coastal community.

So, we’ve covered an awful lot, which is now part of the fun trying to write it all up. 

Do you think there are other areas in the country with similar challenges that could learn from what you’ve discovered?

In at structural sense, setting something up like the housing commission is really useful to really focus in areas of response I think, I think the politicians will see that when we report back part of what we’ve done is to really build that picture up. And so hopefully that means beyond commission, we’ll still be able to or somebody will still be able to continue to look into that. They’ll be able to monitor what’s going on.

They can see where there are interventions that they take make that can make a difference to some of the issues that Devon faces. Devon and Torbay are entering into a devolution deal, and housing is a strand of that. It is positive that housing is recognised, but I think creates some challenges in the way that the districts and the proposed combined authority will work together. But I think there are real opportunities there, as well those challenges. So that might be something that other areas of the country can learn from.

What are some of the other challenges faced by the region when it comes to unlocking housing delivery?

We’ve heard that there are some challenges around planning, which, of course, is some of the things you hear nationally. Right across the country the speed of planning is an issue. We’ve been looking into why that is a particular issue in parts of Devon and how we might be able to alleviate some of those planning pressures that developers feel, while also recognising how local authorities are working incredibly hard to try and make their systems work as well as they can within national systems. I think we’ll have some quite interesting recommendations around that.

In Devon itself, we essentially don’t have enough affordable housing. That’s one of the key things. The key issue, which I think is the same everywhere, but you see some real low, low levels of affordable housing in some of our areas and you also see every single district in Devon has a higher affordability ratio, that is the salary to to house price ratio, than the England average. We don’t have any districts that are below that. And we see the increases in housing price being high in Devon as well.

We’ve also seen challenges around private rented stock, the levels of that fall,  andit’s quite difficult to get accurate data on that. But you can take snapshot type data, and you see an increase in the number of short term holiday lets and a decrease in the number of long term lets. How that impacts particular areas can be quite profound, certainly in areas of North Devon, the South Hams it’s made a real impact.

It sounds like the region has housing needs across most tenures and types. What types of homes do you think are most in need?

The research will show this in more detail but ultimately, we don’t have enough homes, affordable homes for older people. You may well see some some houses being developed at the more premium end of the market but not at the affordable end.

But we also don’t have enough of the one-bedroom homes that younger people starting out in their careers would be able to afford. That’s something the university is particularly interested in. People come to Exeter and then they leave again once they finish their degree.

People who grew up in Devon, like I did, like many of my friends did in the 90s, go and you get that drain of people because there aren’t the opportunities and the housing down here to cater. So at either end of the housing spectrum we have challenges. We’ll be making some comments on that throughout the piece of work.

Why did the commission want to be involved with the Development Partnership Forum?

For any of these sorts of reports to not end up as just a report on a shelf you need to get the buy in of the local sector.

So any opportunity that we have to do that we will take either through me or through Lord Best. We want to raise as much awareness as we can. We want to get people to understand what we’re looking at and to be aware that come the summer there will be some work coming out. We want people to know what’s happening and that if these recommendations are going to work and make a difference everyone needs to be on board and engaged with them. 

To hear more from Matt Dodd on the commission’s findings head to the Housing Forum’s Development Partnership Forum event in Exeter on 5 June.

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