A reminder that, if you don't allocate land for housing you get a shortage of housing

The thing with housing crises is that, to solve them, you probably need some more houses. This simple fact seems to have passed by councillors in North Ayrshire in considering the matter of why people working on the island of Arran can't afford to live there:

The group, made up of local business people and community activists, believes houses on the island are among the least affordable in the UK. Arran’s average annual wage is £24,000, but average house prices are eight to 10 times that, giving it an affordability ratio nearly as bad as in London.

The problem, we're told, is that Arran is a lovely place meaning that lots of housing has been bought up as second homes and holiday lets. Now this can prove something of a problem but only when the planning authority decides that, in effect, nobody can build any new housing for sale anywhere on the island. I exaggerate but not much. Here is the new housing allocation for Arran in the North Ayrshire Council local plan:



Yes folks. Now you know why there is a crisis (the "total" there is for the whole of North Ayrshire Council). So much of Arran has special planning protections that the council can only find enough land to build 60 houses - despite the suggestion that nearly a quarter of the homes of the island are holiday lets or second homes.

Now it's also true that Arran has a pretty special geology and, as a result, there's a desire to protect its landscape and heritage. But somewhere between almost no new housing and covering the island with houses there's a compromise and it's more than 60 (I'm guessing there's some existing allocation as well but the draft local plan isn't very helpful here).

So what's needed? Assuming the population is intended to grow a little and there's a current shortage, the number of homes probably needs to grow by about 25% (allowing for replacement of homes lost to holiday lets). Arran had, in 2011, just over 2000 homes meaning it needs about 300 new ones. If we take a density of 30 homes per hectare (pretty generous - you might get 40 per ha.) then we need 10 hectares - we've already got two of them in the allocation, so 8 hectares.


Arran has 43,200 hectares to go at - we need just 0.02% of the island. Does anyone really think this can't be done?


To give the Council's leader some credit he realises that the proposals from the local campaign group aren't good enough:

He said the extra homes would not solve Arran’s problem entirely, so the council would need to consider relaxing planning rules on the island to increase the availability of land.

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