Villages face property price crisis

5:00pm Thursday 14th June 2007

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DORSET must build more village homes if it is to combat a housing crisis which is pricing 70 per cent of people out of the market in rural areas.

Property costs have shot up so much that the county is now almost 'a no-go area' for local people who want to buy a home in the countryside.

The grim picture was revealed by the Commission for Rural Communities which today warned that hotspots in some parts of Dorset now had property prices more than 10 times average local earnings.

The Commission, an independent Government advisory body which focuses on tackling disadvantage in rural communities, said that barely half the households in many rural towns and villages in England could afford to buy housing on the open market and it was even tougher in Dorset.

County figures show an average rural house price of £277,235, a staggering 10.1 times the average income for such areas of £27,561.

Rocketing rural property prices have seen homes rise by nearly £130,000 in just six years, an increase of 87.5 per cent, said the Commission.

Weymouth and Portland housing spokesman Councillor Mike Goodman said the answer had to lie in building more village homes but in a carefully controlled fashion which took full account of Dorset's beautiful and sensitive environment.

He added: "It is a desperate situation for local people and there is no simple solution or we would have taken it a long time ago.

"We have to try and improve the local economy in order to improve local wages and tackle a programme of home building because at the moment rural Dorset is almost a no-go area for people who want to buy a house.

"Sooner or later there are going to have to be some fairly hard decisions taken about development because you can't go on preserving every village from some form of development. Village communities have to accept the fact that there is going to be, say, five per cent new building there every year if there is going to be hope for the future. We have to strive for graceful expansion against a backdrop of areas designated as being Sites of Special Scientific Interest or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty which must be preserved.

"We must be much more sensitive to need because at the moment everyone hides behind barriers which say 'no'."

Mr Goodman added that a prime examplewas the Poundbury development at Dorchester.

He said: "There were a lot of fears about that development but I don 't think it has trashed the Dorset countryside."