Housing Investigation: New homes out of reach for too many locals

In the six years Harrogate had no Local Plan, housing developers were able to flood the market with expensive four and five bedroom homes. 

It meant an opportunity to address Harrogate’s housing needs was missed and the district remains unaffordable for many young people and those on lower incomes, such as key workers.  

Megan’s Story: 

Megan McHugh

Megan McHugh, 24, has lived in Harrogate all her life and said it’s “heartbreaking” that she cannot afford to buy a house in her hometown. 

She has £20,000 in savings, earns a decent salary as a team leader at a local supermarket and is careful with how she spends her money.  

But she said she feels “stuck” living at her parents’ house, with her dream of owning a home further and further out of reach because the local market isn’t providing the type of home she needs at a price she can afford. 

“I always say this time next year I’d like to be in my own place,” she said. “Then I work it out and think I physically can’t afford it. I’d go tomorrow if I could, but I can’t.” 

Megan said she gets frustrated when she sees housing developments built in Harrogate with so many four– and five-bedroom houses.  

“It’s an affluent area so they want to bring more affluent people into the area and make Harrogate look better,” she added. 

“But if you’re like me and you want to buy your own home in Harrogate, you’ve got absolutely no chance. I feel stuck.” 

What types of homes are needed?  

When a developer builds on a patch of land, 40% of the homes must be classed as “affordable”. But because HBC had no Local Plan up to 2020, it was unable to dictate to developers the types of homes needed for the remaining 60%, which led to a flood of executive-style four-and five–bedroom properties being built. 

Harrogate published a Housing and Economic Development Needs Assessment (HEDNA) report in 2018 outlining the types of houses are needed in the Harrogate district. 

It reported a “notable” demand in the district for one- and two-bedroom properties, with estate agents suffering from a shortage in stock, which it said was driving up prices. 

It also said four-bedroom properties and above should only take up 20-35% of the homes in development. 

But the HEDNA report was published four years after Harrogate’s draft Local Plan was withdrawn, and in that time more than 6,000 homes had been given planning permission. 

The Stray Ferret analysed the period when Harrogate went without a Local Plan and found that house builders were building far more four- and five-bedroom homes than the report said the district needed. 

These include Miller Homes’ 176-home Milby Grange development in Boroughbridge, where 45% of the properties are either four– or five–bedroom, and Bellway’s 170-home Dalesway development on Skipton Road, where 43% had four bedrooms or more.  

Affordable housing 

While developers cashed in to build expensive four-and five–bedroom homes in the district, Harrogate Borough Council has largely ensured affordable houses make up 40% of developments. 

However, many of these homes are still not affordable in most normal people’s definition of the word. 

The government defines affordable as homes sold at 80% of the market rate or homes for social rent. 

But with the average house price in Harrogate £360,000, according to property website Zoopla, it means that an “affordable” property in Harrogate is still more than 10 times the average salary of £25,000. 

Then there is social housing, which are homes provided to people on low incomes or with particular needs by councils or housing associations.

The council has around 1,800 households on its social housing waiting list  — but in Harrogate, less than one in ten applicants are likely to be allocated a property each year. This waiting list has swelled as Right to Buy sales have depleted HBC of its housing stock.

To try to meet demand, the council recently spent £4.5m buying 52 homes in Stonebridge Homes’ 130-home development on Whinney Lane. 

Sixteen of the homes would be transferred to HBC’s housing company, Bracewell Homes, to be sold under shared ownership, and the rest would be made available for social rent. The council has said similar purchases could be forthcoming. 

“You need people of all ages to keep a place alive”

The Knaresborough Community Land Trust (CLT) is hoping to develop a disused area in the town centre to provide three flats as affordable housing. 

Hilary Gardner, treasurer at the CLT, said many young people are being forced to move to places like Leeds because they simply cannot afford to buy a place in Knaresborough. 

“It’s denying people the opportunity that was a given for their parents, providing they worked hard. 

“Being able to buy your own property when you’re in your 30s is important, isn’t it? 

“There are large properties being built in Knaresborough, but they are not for everyone.” 

The long–term effect on people not being able to afford homes could be profound in a town like Knaresborough, which could see its lifeblood disappear. She added: 

“You need a body of people of all ages to keep a place alive.” 

The Knaresborough Community Land Trust is hoping to develop a disused area in the town centre to provide three flats as affordable housing.

Read More:

“We need homes to be distributed more fairly”

The proliferation of housebuilding in the district has largely been driven by central government, which wants to see 300,000 new homes built across the UK, with every region building its share. 

However, Dr Quinton Bradley, lecturer in housing and planning at Leeds Beckett University, told the Stray Ferret the government’s economic theory for housebuilding is “fundamentally flawed” because it’s led to an uneven and unequal housing market, as seen in Harrogate. 

“It’s not as simple as saying, ‘build more homes then the price will come down’…The house builders don’t want that, so that whole analysis is fundamentally flawed.

“The housing crisis is not a crisis of undersupply –, we need homes to be distributed more fairly.” 

Homes for ‘economic growth’ 

Harrogate’s 2018 HEDNA report concluded that the district needs 669 new homes to be built every year, yet it said only 296 of these homes are to serve the genuine housing need of the local population, which might be a young family trying to buy their first home or an elderly couple wanting to downsize. 

The report added that 314 of these 669 homes should be built for “economic growth”: attracting wealthy people into the town and into high-value jobs in the science, logistics and finance industries, which are the sectors Harrogate Borough Council wants to boost, according to the HEDNA report. 

However, Dr Bradley said building homes for economic growth is “basically wish fulfilment”. 

“Nobody knows how the economy will grow. The people writing the HEDNA report would have asked HBC, ‘how would you like Harrogate to be in the future?’  

“They’d say, ‘Well we’d like it to be really prosperous so let’s allocate some more housing for that’, but it’s a fantasy.” 

With development set to progress at its current pace for at least the next 15 years, the gulf between the housing haves and have-nots in Harrogate is likely to widen further. 

It means that Megan McHugh’s hopes of owning her own property in her hometown will continue to be out of reach. 

Throughout this week we’ll be looking at the impact of the unprecedented levels of development in the district:

Investigation: Harrogate targeted for development during planning chaos

An investigation by the Stray Ferret has uncovered how some of Britain’s biggest land promoters deliberately targeted Harrogate to exploit cheap land and high property prices.

Between 2014 and 2020 the district’s planning system was in disarray.

These failings made it easy for developers to get controversial housing schemes approved. The developers, knowing this, made speculative applications for thousands of homes across the district.

All this week, the Stray Ferret looks at the impact of six years of planning failings: thousands of extra cars on the roads, large detached houses prioritised over much-needed affordable homes for local people, and a lack of sustainable, environmentally friendly building.

Today, we examine how the Harrogate district became a target for opportunistic developers .

The draw of Harrogate

The Harrogate district is a prime place for money to be made in property.

It’s one of the most desirable places to live, often coming top in national property surveys. Just last month, Harrogate was named the ‘chic capital of the North’ by Tatler. It makes it very attractive to developers.

The latest figures put the average home at almost £360,000 – a whopping 13 times the average income for the district.

It is, according to the Harrogate Borough Council Housing Strategy 2019-2024, the least affordable area in the north of England.

It means home owning is out of reach for many low to middle income families caught in the Harrogate housing trap. There are more than 2,000 families in the district on the Housing Register living in unsuitable accommodation.

It’s not a question of Harrogate building too many properties. Rather, it’s too few of the right homes, in the right places, at the right price to meet local people’s need for affordable homes.

Planning failings

Every council has to put forward a 21-year plan to the Secretary of State for approval.The Planning Inspectorate examines local plans on the Secretary of State’s behalf to determine their suitability.

In 2014, the Planning Inspectorate advised Harrogate Borough Council  to withdraw its version of the Local Development Plan (or LDP 2014-2035).

The LDP sets out the council’s priorities and policies for land use. It defines where and how many homes can be built, where employment sites are located and what our town centre will become.

For a plan to be approved, it must demonstrate that it is well evidenced and meets local need. The plan must be in accordance with the National Planning Policy Framework and a raft of legislation, practice guidance and regulations.

Harrogate Borough Council withdrew its draft LDP at its first hearing on April 24, 2014, upon advice from the planning inspectorate.

The failed plan – years in the making – was deemed ‘inadequate’.

A letter from the Planning Inspectorate to Harrogate on April 29, 2014 explained that the evidence used in the plan was too out of date to be meaningful.

Harrogate was forced back to the drawing board.

Prior to its submission, Liberal Democrat leader councillor Pat Marsh had told the Yorkshire Post:

“I do not have confidence in anything to do with the plan, whether it be the actual allocation of homes, whether there is the necessary infrastructure in place to cope and how members will be able to decide on the final proposals which are still being finalised. I have been a councillor for 22 years, but I have never experienced anything quite like this. It is a complete shambles.”

Conservative councillor Alan Skidmore, who was appointed cabinet member for planning at HBC in 2012, publicly defended the plan at the time. Yet speaking to the Stray Ferret this year, he said he knew the plan that had been prepared was “absolute rubbish”.

“I was astonished. I delayed it as much as I could, much to the chagrin of certain planning officers. We were forced to submit it in the state it was in, because if we didn’t, the government would have taken steps against us.”

Houses under construction at Harlow Hill Grange in Harrogate

The local plan should have helped control where new housing was built

Land supply

Harrogate failed on another critical requirement. Councils must show that they have a supply of specific deliverable sites enough to provide five years’ worth of new housing (plus an appropriate buffer).

This is called the five-year land supply (5YLS).

In 2014, the council had more than two thousand families on the housing register.

Planning inspectors and developers surgically dissected Harrogate’s calculation that just 390 new market and affordable homes per annum was enough to meet housing need.

The figure had to be revised, and Harrogate employed a consultant, GL Hearn.

To meet the 5YLS, Harrogate had to find enough developers with land to deliver 1,050 completed homes a year.

As a result, the land earmarked for development within the plan was insufficient.

The perfect storm

Without an approved local plan and evidence of a five-year land supply, a condition called the ‘tilted balance in favour of presumption of approval’ was triggered which prioritised building houses.

In 2013, the Campaign for Rural England warned local government that a

“widespread failure to implement local plans left 175 local authorities (including Harrogate) vulnerable to ‘damaging development’”.

But the Federation of House Builders disagreed, saying:

‘‘Fears that the lack of a (local development) plan will lead to the untrammelled destruction of the countryside are overblown. Even where there is no Local Plan, development must still conform to the NPPF, which clearly sets out that development must be well located, well designed and sustainable.”

Harrogate Borough Council planners advised councillors from 2014 to 2018 that there was a ‘tilted balance’ in favour of approval on almost every major development regardless of whether the site was well located and sustainable.

For almost every major housing scheme, planning officers advised committee members to approve the application.

The planning committee did turn down some applications during that time, though, and the council successfully defended its decision at appeal.

A district vulnerable to promoters

Enter the land promoter: land promoters seek out land which could be ripe for housing and help the owner get outline planning permission before managing the onward sale to a developer.

In the Harrogate district, a hectare of agricultural land will fetch around £25,000 at the farmers’ auction.

As a development site with outline planning approval, the same land will realise between £1.2 and £2.3 million.

The promoter then takes a share of the land’s increased value when it’s sold.

Gladman Land is the promoter behind applications for nearly 1,500 properties in the district since 2014, including Harrogate, Boroughbridge, Killinghall and Knaresborough.

Co-founder David Gladman told the High Court in July 2016:

“We normally only target local authorities whose planning is in relative disarray and… either have no up-to-date local plan or, temporarily, they do not have a five-year supply of consented building plots.”

Even if the council refuses the application, it’s of no consequence.

Gladman Land stated that going to appeal was part of its business strategy, with a success rate of over 90%. They advertise themselves as one of the most successful land promoters in England.

It’s completely legal and was essentially a standard practice within the land promotion industry.

In 2016/17, Harrogate received the highest number of planning applications since records began.

Crofter's Green Killinghall

The development at Crofters Green, Killinghall, was one of those passed at appeal. Click here to read more.

Strengthening position

By January 2019, Harrogate could demonstrate a robust 5YLS which tilted the balance in a different direction.

Harrogate Borough Council’s planning committee was advised to support an outline application by Gladman’s to build 175 houses on Bar Lane, Knaresborough.

The debate ran over several hours with councillors struggling to reach a consensus, despite officers’ recommendation to approve the proposal. Eventually, the committee deferred the application to planning officers to approve, subject to some details being finalised.

But just nine months later, on September 9, 2019, the same application returned to the planning committee who refused it against the advice of officers.

The advanced state of the local plan and a healthy 5YLS gave the planning committee the confidence to reject the proposal.

The local development plan was finally accepted by the planning inspectorate and adopted by HBC in May 2020 affording further protection against harmful development in the borough.

But the damage has been done to the fabric of our communities, and over the next week, the Stray Ferret will look at the impact that six years of planning dysfunction has had on the lives of local people.

Coming up

All this week, we look at the impact of a planning system in disarray.