SELF BUILD IN SUSSEX WWW.WHITE-DESIGN.COM BACKGROUND
LOCATION
Lewes Town Hall
TALK
This transcript is the ‘highlights’ of Craig White’s talk at the Making Lewes Seminar. Craig founded White Design in 1998; he is a Design Advice consultant with the Carbon Trust, a board member of the Timber Research and Development Association and was Chair of Wood for Gold (Olympic Development Agency timber advisors). Craig White: LILAC is a co-housing project is Leeds. The great thing about co-housing was we could break rules everywhere in terms of planning. This is Leeds City Council, a metropolitan authority. When we first sat down with LILAC and the design team and said this is what we’re doing, we had the highways person, a planner, an affordability officer and we had the Homes and Communities Agency in there as well. The first thing the highways said was ‘you need a road circulating round the centre of the development and you must have carparking outside every house’ then the affordable person said ‘there is 20 houses so you now need to deliver X % as affordable’ and then a whole series of ‘this is why you cannot do what your proposing to do here’. One of the key concerns from the planner was how can you put the covenants in place to ensure that all of this stays where it is. In co-housing principles parking is pushed to the perimeter and then the space around which the houses are developed is shared and public space.
The reality of communities delivering their own housing is quite a challenge, LILAC took six years. The first three years were spent just trying to find a site and having many many meetings in pubs talking about governance structure. Custom build is one of the new agendas, as we heard earlier on today, and there is funding available. So, custom build. The particular iteration that is coming into the UK is based on a Dutch model where plots are laid out by a master planning architect, infrastructure is put in, and then there are companies called home manufacturers who will offer you types of houses. Were one of those types of home manufacturers, Richard Rogers is another. There are issues I think with it being directly transported here to the UK, but it does sit with the NPPF. Last year self-builders were the largest provider of housing in the UK by a factor of 3, they built 15,000 homes Here is where it all starts to change: the UK Government wants to scale up prefabrication. The Affordable Housing Programme is to benefit from a £150 million to support custom build. The Right to Build Fund will receive £400 million in London, and £200 million across 10 yet to be identified sites in the UK. The Local Growth Fund has gained £300 million of housing revenue account borrowings to deliver custom build. The Local Growth Deals means all local authorities are obliged to identify sites that are available for custom builders, and offer them only for custom building groups to bid for. On these sites a commercial developer cannot build, they cannot be open market, they cannot be Buy to Let, they cannot be a great many things. Finally the Regional Growth Fund Round 6 is £200 million, so that is just shy of a billion pounds the government is allocating to kick start the process of us delivering our own homes…
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In light of recent large scale development proposals, Making Lewes is a forum for all concerned with the future of our built environment. Making Lewes supports alternative, green and progressive development to reflect the individual and independent, cultural and creative character of Lewes. The Making Lewes HOUSING FUTURES EXHIBITION & SEMINAR was held in October 2014. Speakers were: Jeremy Till, Teva Hesse, David Knight, Richard Dollamore, Sarah Wigglesworth, Craig White, Kareem Dayes, Soren Nielsen and Gareth Roberts.
LILAC has 3 storey apartments, 2 storey houses and a common house. When we said we only want 10 car parking spaces they said oh no, the parking provision is one point something per dwelling, because what happens if you were to sell these houses in the future? Basically co-housing is an opt in structure that you legalise using a variety of different methods from co-operative living, and there are many many flavours of that, all the way through to a fully mutual home ownership society.