Rural housing 'crisis' prices young people out

Clare says she has been priced out of her childhood village in Norfolk

It's now harder than ever for young people living in rural areas to get on the housing ladder, Newsbeat's been told.

Campaign group The National Housing Federation claims the average rural house price in England is now more than 12 times the average salary of people living in rural areas.

They say the problems are very similar across the rest of the UK.

The figures show that in order to secure a typical mortgage, a person living and working in the countryside would now need to earn at least £66,000 a year.

At the moment the average income of people in rural areas is just over £20,000.

It means that young people are being forced to leave the villages where they grew up against their will because in many cases they cannot afford to rent, let alone buy.

Clare Dixon, 29, and her boyfriend Matt, grew up in the seaside village of Brancaster on the Norfolk coast. They want to stay there to be close to family and friends but say they've been priced out.

'Figures are frightening'

"We've both lived in Brancaster all our lives so I've really not known anything else but the life I had there.

"We grew up there and we want to live there. We both work long hours and earn a reasonable salary so it's frustrating that we can't afford to live somewhere where we've been all our lives."

Instead Clare's had to rent in another village six miles away: "It's not ideal because I want to be in the place where I know.

"It's where your heart is, it's where you grow up and you know when you walk down the street you can say 'hello' to everybody. It's just like a big family and it's a nice place to live."

"These latest figures are frightening. The idea of having to earn £66,000 a year to afford a home is totally unrealistic. It just means it's never going to happen and that is depressing."

'All time peak'

The average price for a two bedroom house in Brancaster is around £180,000 but the village's popularity has seen prices of many cottages surge over the past 10 years.

It's now thought more than half of homeowners there use their property as a holiday home.

The local shop had to move to a cabin when business suffered

Paul Rees from the National Housing Federation says the problem of affordable rural housing has never been worse: "The situation with rural housing and the intensity of the crisis has reached an all time peak.

"The number of people on waiting lists for an affordable home in villages and market towns is standing at 750,000 people."

He also thinks the growing trend of people buying up properties in villages to use as holiday homes is having a knock-on effect on rural life: "These villages are dying on their feet.

"The people who would have gone to the village shop or pub or sent their kids to the village school are being priced out.

"So in some cases, many of what some might see as 'picture postcard' villages are becoming little more than theme parks."

Clare says the number of second home owners in Brancaster has transformed the place she grew up: "It does have a massive impact on the area because a lot of the local businesses are affected.

"It's so busy in the summer but in the winter it's like a ghost town. It's just dead.

"The social club there used to be very busy but two years ago it nearly went bankrupt because no locals were around to keep it going. The local shop has had to close from it's premises. It's just operates from a cabin now because trade drops so much in winter."

The government has recognised that affordability is becoming an issue in villages across England.

It recently announced the Right to Build initiative which it claims will enable homes to be built without seeking council planning permission.

But the National Housing Federation are warning that planned cuts to government department budgets could impact funds to build new homes.