Tackling depopulation through development

This is in contrast to the national picture of overcrowded schools, congested roads and GP practices unable to cope with patient demand.

Extensive rural areas in the North, which are strongly characterised by national landscape designations, need more people living in them to maintain their infrastructure and their qualities.

Key local services such as primary schools are under threat because there are not enough children.

This summer saw the latest closure, of Horton-in-Ribblesdale Primary School which has been providing education in the west of the park for 250 years.

“Extensive rural areas in the North, which are strongly characterised by national landscape designations, need more people living in them to maintain their infrastructure.”

Of course the population of the Dales has always been in flux as industries, such as mining, grow and contract. Unfortunately the current phase is one of decline.

The housing need calculations set out in the recent government consultation, ‘Planning for the right homes in the right places’, presents a North/South divide, with the North planning to over-provide and the south under-providing against its higher projected level of growth.

Alongside other northern authorities, the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority is actively promoting new housing to try to get back to the (modest) levels of building prior to 2009.

In a change of strategy, its recently adopted local plan now has two objectives: to support housing to meet local needs and to attempt to repopulate the park more generally.

In partnership with district councils, the authority is considering an initiative to market the high environmental quality of the national park as a place to move to, as well as visit.

The barriers to new housing are the lack of large sites, the distance from a full range of services and the competition from easier sites in the better-connected A1, M6 and A65 corridors that surround the park.

These factors have dissuaded the volume builders from being active in the park.

Yorkshire Dales landowners are therefore less likely to act in rational market ways.

“Unstable national policy and lending restrictions have only acted to perpetuate uncertainty.”

Some never contemplate the development potential of their land, while others prefer to hold onto their planning permissions for a future day, rather than build immediately.

Unstable national policy and lending restrictions have only acted to perpetuate uncertainty.

Demand for housing has dropped because household growth is low. Many young people have already left and the affordability gap between local wages and house prices is unbridgeable.

If these trends are projected forward and used as the basis for planning future housing provision, then the national park’s communities will continue to decline.

The Dales need more people of working age to sustain the area’s infrastructure and not least to continue to deliver the statutory national park purposes of conserving the landscape and promoting its enjoyment by the nation.

One of our responses is to try to get more movement on existing sites.

A webpage has been set up promoting the opportunities provided by the recently adopted local plan.

“One of our responses is to try to get more movement on existing sites.”

A list of every extant planning permission in the park has been published with a link sent to every local builder, developer, agent and parish council.

The hope is that it may help move existing sites forward while new sites are found. If more of this land could find its way into public ownership it might also get developed more quickly.

But solutions beyond the planning system are needed as well. It is notable that the 15-year objectively assessed need for housing in the national park is five times smaller than the current stock of second homes and holiday lets.

In some years the transfer of existing homes to ‘cold beds’ can cancel out new home completions. Between 2001 and 2011, 450 new homes were built in the park but the population only increased by 100 people.

The proportion of the housing stock that are second homes, holiday lets or otherwise vacant increased from 15% to 22%.

A possible, but undoubtedly controversial, response might be to significantly increase council tax on second homes to incentivise their sale and encourage more ‘warm beds’.

Ultimately, though, it may be too optimistic to hope that the implementation of new planning policies and joint action with district councils alone will turn around the current phase of upland depopulation.

Peter Stockton, head of sustainable development, Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority