A community in Stroud, Gloucestershire, is working up plans for new affordable housing, allotments, healthcare and much more, using a former hospital site that has lain derelict for a decade.

The driving force is Gloucestershire Land for People, a community land trust that got resounding backing at a meeting of stakeholders recently. GLP hopes to be gifted the former hospital site by English Partnerships in order to deliver a new form of local ownership.

If the plan goes through this July, the 11-acre site could provide up to 55 new affordable homes. GLP is working with London-based social landlord CDS Co-operatives as development partner. CDS developed a model for helping local people into ownership at the same time as preserving assets for the community. Now it is to be piloted at Cashes Green in Stroud, with a view to promoting the idea nationally.

The idea is for GLP to hold the land in perpetuity, removing it from the open market. Once the new homes are developed by CDS and a mutual home ownership society set up by GLP, owners will buy equity shares in the buildings of the whole development – not their individual house.

Holding the land value in trust could cut the cost of the homes by up to half, and owners could buy more shares as their income grows over time. Then on leaving they would sell back to the mutual and new owners could buy those shares. All repairs and management would be done by the mutual, fostering a strong sense of community cohesion.

CDS chief executive David Rodgers says the scheme is much needed in Gloucestershire. “The south west has one of the worst ratios of house prices to incomes,” he says. “A growing proportion of households are unable to purchase and there is a very big gap between supply and demand for affordable housing.”

GLP is very much about active citizenship, Mr Rodgers adds. “The residents are fully involved in the design and in what will be provided. We facilitate but they drive the vision.”

CDS Co-operatives and the New Economics Foundation developed their community ownership model with help from a Housing Corporation innovation and good practice grant.

Find out more
www.dta.org.uk

Community housing partnerships
The Development Trusts Association encourages housing associations to work with community organisations to achieve affordable housing and other developments.
It suggests housing associations can:

• partner a community to get through the complex and lengthy process of land acquisition and development;
• use social housing grants to subsidise land acquisition and building costs;
• use their credibility, track record and financial strength to reassure other stakeholders and spread the risks;
• use their knowledge of particular architects, quantity surveyors and other professionals and advise on who might be employed;
• use their development expertise in negotiating a way through the planning system;
• support any intermediate market housing (and other non-housing needs) that are part of the project; and
• help communities to acquire assets rather than ownership being held by the housing association.