CPRE Shropshire
Protecting Shropshire

Home

News

Campaigns & Issues

Events & Debates

Support CPRE

About CPRE Shropshire

Search CPRE

CPRE Oswestry

CPRE West Midlands

CPRE National Website

Sign up for our National Campaigns Update

Join CPRE or donate

13 July 2010

“We have a choice. Build affordable housing in villages or let those villages die.” That’s the message from CPRE Shropshire Chairman Andy Boddington in response to a new report by the National Housing Federation, CPRE and other countryside groups.

He continues: “If we are to have a beautiful countryside, it must thrive. For it to thrive, people need to work in the landscape to keep its pubs, shops and above all its schools alive. We have a growing problem here in Shropshire with village housing being taken up by the wealthy retired and second home owners, or let as holiday cottages. We need places to live for the people who work in our pubs, staff our post offices and teach in our schools. We must build small scale affordable housing for them.”

“Affordable housing need not damage the beauty and tranquillity of the countryside. What we need is small developments of affordable housing near to where people work. We need developments that are sympathetically tucked into the folds of rural landscape and in tune with local building styles.”

“Our greatest worry is that affordable housing is often only funded through contributions from developers who want to build sprawling estates of market housing. We need new models of house building such as Community Land Trusts. That way we can get the affordable housing we need without destroying Shropshire’s greatest asset, the natural and historic environment.”

‘Affordable housing keeps villages alive’ is published 13 July by the National Housing Federation (NHF), Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), Countryside Alliance, Commission for Rural Communities and Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE).