Sustainable, Affordable Rural Housing: The Challenge for Rural Scotland

The Second Andrew Raven Memorial Weekend
27 - 29 June 2008
Ardtornish House, Morvern

With thanks to Adam Nicolson for preparing this record

After the inspiring success of the first Andrew Raven Memorial Weekend at Ardtornish in June 2007, which was devoted to climate change and rural Scotland, half the participants returned a year later, along with a cohort of newcomers, for a weekend designed to address a more detailed aspect of the same subject: rural housing that could be both sustainable and affordable.

Already, the tradition of these weekends was evolving. The Andrew Raven Memorial Trust had been set up, trustees appointed and a fund established. The atmosphere of this second weekend had also moved on: less global policy challenges, more attention to practical realities, to the doing of real things in real, detailed ways. And the presence of Andrew's memory had subtly altered. In 2007, his not being there had seemed powerfully present. He was the one person everyone felt was missing from the discussions. Now that sense of absence had diminished and instead this had become a group of people gathered from Scotland, England and the United States which in the most practical way was taking on the driving purpose of Andrew's own life: the integration of social, environmental and economic goals. Andrew's memory was moving on from loss to example.

Simon Pepper, the convenor of the weekend and Chairman of the newly formed Trust, reminded everyone that this was about enjoyment as much as anything. Andrew Raven had always loved inviting people to Ardtornish for the weekend and the point was good discussion, good craic, good food, new relationships, mutual enlightenment from unfamiliar perspectives. This was not an extension of formal working lives. It was to be free and loose, scattered, various, informal, networky. The point wasn't to start a campaign. Everyone hoped for a more organic outcome than that.

But there was a serious issue to be addressed: the affordability, sustainability and availability of housing in rural Scotland. The Housing Condition Survey conducted in the mid-90s had found that a third of housing in Scotland was 'fuel poor'. For every 1 % increase in fuel prices, 8,000 extra homes would fall into fuel poverty. Recent increases of 30-40% therefore raise major issues. That is why sustainable, affordable housing had become an issue central to the social, environmental and economic wellbeing of rural Scotland.

Ardtornish and housing

Angus Robertson, who had been the factor at Ardtornish, he said, since the beginning of time, described the nature of the estate and its engagement with the housing needs of the community in Morvern. Ardtornish is a multi-faceted place: a 35,000 acre estate which needs to be economically self-sufficient; a farm with 2,000 blackface ewes and 250 beef cattle; a holiday cottage business; stalking and fishing; fish farming, sandmining and forestry operations; wonderful natural assets in its lochs, hills, woods, rivers and coastline, matched by an important cultural heritage in its 25 listed buildings, 5 ancient monuments and nationally important archives. Ardtornish had made large investments in renewable energy: in 1996 a 750kW hydro scheme had been installed and two new schemes were about to go for planning permission, aiming for a total 3 MW of hydro production.

None of this would be sustainable without the support of a strong local community and housing was the essential tool to allow a community to live and thrive. Lack of housing meant a lack of life. The estate had been in the firing line locally for not releasing land for housing but these issues were far from easy to resolve.

Angus described the many elaborate consultation exercises with the community over the last nine years or so. Progress was complex and slow. First were the suggestions made in 2001 by a group of professional planners (from the US, EU and UK under the Countryside Exchange programme) that the landowner's reluctance to release land was restricting social development potential, that affordable housing was a priority and home ownership would stabilise the community.

Meetings with the community in 2002 and a housing needs survey in 2003 by Di Alexander of the Highland Small Communities Housing Trust identified the requirements.

There was a variety of needs: the elderly; young local people; friends and relations wishing to return to Morvern; and incomers who could create jobs and wealth - all had their demands. Within Morvern, people did not want either wealthy retirees or holiday homes. (Although the roots of these prejudices were not explored.)
And a variety of housing types was required: affordable housing to own, rent or lease; dedicated sheltered housing; and also larger house plots with room to develop a business.
And a spread of locations: most people wanted development around Lochaline village but others wanted development to the west, down the Drimnin Road.

The Highland Small Communities Housing Trust and Ardtornish started a feasibility study for new housing in Lochaline, a long, slow and at times agonised process. Design standards had to be established, and the insistence on slate roofs, at a steep pitch, with 'proper windows' did not go down well with local people. Ardtornish fell out both with the village and with the planners. But sites were sold to local people and three houses have now been built, if only after endless problems with planning authorities and the electricity and water boards. One man who built one of the houses now says he will never build another house in Morvern again.

At the same time Ardtornish began work on outline proposals for a new township on a historic site, cleared in the 19th century, a few miles west of Lochaline at Achabeg.
For the masterplan, the estate had three key factors in mind. Any development must:

• look good in the landscape.
• gain favour with planners.
• have the correct balance of affordable to commercial plots due to the high development costs.

Achabeg was never going to be cheap because of the distance between houses and the need to put in roads and other services. But there was an exciting opportunity here to develop something which might become a model of a new community in a beautiful place.

The historic pattern of housing in Morvern - Jennie Robertson

Two maps of the occupation patterns in Morvern in 2000 and in 1800, shown by the archaeologist Jennie Robertson, elegantly revealed the peninsula as an abandoned landscape, particularly along the southwestern shore, facing the Sound of Mull. Jennie described Morvern as 'littered with deserted settlements'. In 1800, its population had been more than 2000; it was 350 today. It looked like a place ready for reoccupation.

She went on to describe the type of housing that would have been found in these settlements, typically of 15-30 houses in each. Extant remains consist of drystane masonry, thick walls with rounded corners, oriented east-west to minimize the impact of the prevailing winds. Earlier houses were built of locally sourced wood and turf, the inner walls made of woven hazel hurdles (giving them the name of "basket-houses" or "creel-houses") set around heavy wooden crucks or 'couples' on a drystone foundation.

_{Baile Gean Township reconstruction 24:
@Highland Folk Museum Licensor: www.scran.ac.uk}

 

Turf walls were laid around the outside, each turf laid grass to grass, earth to earth, and the walls bound together by the growing grass roots. An acre of land was needed to provide the turf for one house's walls. These were not only houses for the poor; local lairds lived in them, sometimes with 'several apartments finished in a style of taste and elegance.' Examples were still being built in the early 20th century, by then held together with chicken-wire.

The thatched roof would be replaced every ten years and entire house, enriched by its years of soot, could be profitably spread on the fields, the big timbers dismantled, when the inhabitants would 'up-sticks and go,' and re-use them for another building on another site.

By the end of the 18th century, when timber was becoming more valuable for charcoal-making, landlords began to dislike the making of these timber-and-turn houses and encouraged their replacement in stone. Early, transitional examples of stone houses show the slots in which the still-used crucks were accommodated in the new stone walls.

The Political Dimension: Sustainability Hijack - Mark Shucksmith

Professor of Planning at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, Chair of the recent Enquiry into Crofting.

Sustainable Futures and Rural Scotland: contradictions and challenges

Mark Shucksmith had one central point: don’t do it how they do it in England. The place to start was the concept of sustainability developed by the Brundtland report of the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987. She had defined in terms of equity, both between generations and within generations. For Brundtland, social justice was at the heart of sustainability and no question of sustainability could be considered without considering the spillover effects between times and places. If a system in one place reduced equity either there, elsewhere or in the future, it could not be considered sustainable.

This humane understanding of the term, which embraces a form of global, all-time citizenship, had been entirely forgotten in great swathes of the debate in England. There, sustainability is now equated with environmental goals, and specifically with reducing CO2 emissions and car use. The logical implication is that ‘Sustainable Communities’ are now defined in England by the Department for Communities and Local Government principally by the presence of services – schools, shops, housing, hospitals – and access to public transport. And this, by definition, discourages new investment in rural settlements. Anywhere without a school, an hourly bus or a food shop is “unsustainable” and so it is believed that no new houses should be built there. You end up with crude ‘sustainability checklists’ as are operated in Tynedale District, where Mark lives. Does the village shop stock cornflakes? Yes: village sustainable. No: village unsustainable. And the inevitable tendency? The gradual strangling of dispersed communities; and the ever-increasing concentration and urbanisation of settlement.

Why is this happening? Because the concept of sustainable development, which should have social justice at its heart, has been captured by what the planner and urban historian Sir Peter Hall has described as ‘an unholy alliance of rural elites and urban development interests,’ drive by the desire to keep development out of rural areas, increase rural property values and make the rural environment more exclusive. Urban developers are their allies because, in this ideological straitjacket, funds will flow towards urban land at the expense of rural communities. The assumption that concentration is all has led to a general presumption in policy and practice that rural communities are inherently unsustainable. It has reached the point where the writer of a letter to The Economist suggested recently that no one should be allowed to live in settlements of less than 35,000 since these were unsustainable. This way of thinking, which seeks to separate society (urban) from nature (rural), has been pursued since the 1930s (if not before) and its effect is to corral people and jobs into ever denser urban settlements. According to the Deputy Chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, this is a movement ‘which will make people happier.’

Challenges to this way of thinking

Research done by the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) has shown that this narrowed and trivialised definition of sustainability has created an unintended ‘spatial blindness’ in the design of national development policy. Policy-makers aren’t seeing places any more. It has also confirmed a general presumption against growth in rural communities outside key service centres and a general presumption against rural sustainability as a whole. Rural sustainability is thought of as an oxymoron. Dispersed is unsustainable; concentration is green.

Not only is this a false dualism; it is self-fulfilling. Deprive dispersed places of development and they will indeed wither. But it doesn’t need to be like that. In fact, the equity-based definition of sustainability requires that it is not like that. Rural growth is a meaningful phrase and policy should attempt to make all places more sustainable.

How to do that? First, by working with people, helping them to imagine a more sustainable future for their own place. Many people need expert help and advice to identify their own assets and that should be provided by government. Communities can be guided to build on their own strengths and assets, developing a shared vision for their future and a collective strategy to work towards it. Isolation is an enemy and knowledge networks need to be mobilised. Local identity, vision and strategy all need to be locally defined, but the various elements might include:

In Scotland from 2001-2006, the population rose by 4% in remote rural areas, by 6.3% in accessible rural areas and in urban areas by 0.1%. Accessible rural locations are experiencing the highest rate of population growth all over Europe but housing within them is becoming less affordable. The ratio of house prices to incomes worsened in Scotland between 2002 and 2006 – nowhere worse than in the Highlands – and in rural areas the number of affordable houses to rent is lower than in the cities. Increasing demand and lack of supply has the makings of a crisis.

So why is it like this? What are the obstacles to re-animating rural communities?

There is, first of all, an absence of speculative private building. Developers are riding in on the wave of urban development and don’t need to look at rural opportunities. At the same time, public investment is stuck in an old frame of mind and focuses its money on areas of urban decline. This is a political decision dominated by urban constituencies. Both are reinforced by the planners’ culture of containment: keep settlement dense. There needs to be faster and wider release of building land in the Highlands and Islands. Southern Scotland is like England in its heavy culture of containment dominated by ‘sustainability moralists’ whose desire is to ‘Barcelonise Britain’ – an exclusive focus on the rejuvenation of fading or faded industrial cities.

In rural areas, access to building land needs to be improved. Some local land-owning monopolies make building difficult. Infrastructure in the country, especially water and sewerage, are more expensive. Many rural communities don’t have the will or the cohesion to push for development. There are too few rural ‘animateurs’, who need to be pushy, explorative and good on the ground. At a political and cultural level, there is a national lack of understanding of the rural context.

So what might be done?

The Affordable Rural Housing Report by Elinor Goodman for the Commission for Rural Communities has made various suggestions:

• In accessible rural areas, more use should be made of the provisions of Section 75 by which 25% of a new development is required to be built as affordable housing funded from the profits made by the developer out of the remaining 75% of marketable housing.
• In scattered communities, promote Rural Home Ownership grants through local enablers
• Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) pioneer new shared equity/Rural Home Ownership Grants model?
• ‘Constellation model’ of community-owned housing built by RSLs and local authorities (piloted in Western Isles)
• Public funding should be directed toward areas of greatest need and worst affordability. Less prejudiced assessments are required of where the need is greatest – i.e. not in the cities
• Replace Right to Buy with a ‘rural burden’ model, which retains some community equity in a council house
• Encourage councils to build again.

What needs to be done?

A deep cultural change needs to be promoted amongst planners so that they stop thinking of containment and start thinking of ‘Sustainable ruralism’, the shaping of places, a newly imagined future. Place-shaping should be the motive, a sense of possibility, not the drawbacks of containment. Far more exceptions to planning restrictions should be allowed in rural contexts and Section 75 agreements should become the norm. A re-adjustment in the general culture should be made between environmental needs and a sense of social justice for rural communities. As part of that, more land should be allocated for affordable housing, and Compulsory Purchase Orders should be used to that end. A ‘community call for affordable rural housing’ should be piloted which would demand planning consent and necessary services.

• Fund rural housing enablers
• Empowering communities: landbanking by community trusts; and community bodies to access SHG.
• Land assembly, especially public land at below market price

Simon Pepper, in summing up Mark’s paper, said he was reminded of the old jibe which asked what the difference was between the rural developer and the conservationist. Answer: the rural developer wants to go out into the countryside and build beautiful houses; the conservationist already has.

Designing Houses for a Zero Carbon Future – Bill Dunster

On Saturday morning, Bill Dunster, the visionary architect and inspiration behind the Beddington Zero Emissions Development (BedZED) in south London gave a wide-ranging talk on Designing Houses for a Zero Carbon Future.

Social and environmental sustainability are the same thing. It is an artificial argument to set one against the other. And the governing fact is that we are running out of equitable resource. As resources diminish, injustice will increase. Squabbling over whether social justice or carbon impact should take priority is a waste of time.

The search for sustainability is the same as addressing the climate change problem. As a combined challenge, it is easily the most important thing we have to do.

We are doing it very badly at the moment. No one had correctly calculated the quantity of fossil fuel that would be consumed by the industrialization of India and China. We have reached Peak Oil and the price of fossil fuels is now set for an inexorable rise. We may have between 7 and 15 years to make a difference.

In the context of runaway climate change, new structures – physical, social, economic, political, conceptual – are needed if we are not to descend into man-made anarchy. If we are to avoid suicide by petrol pump we must reverse all these trends. Renewable energy is the source of social wellbeing. If anyone thinks that nuclear power is the solution, they haven’t understood. So much fossil fuel is required to get nuclear material out of the ground that we are also fast approaching peak nuclear power. Nor is there enough generating capacity in the wind. Even if there were a wind turbine every 500 metres along the entire UK coastline, only 15 to 30% of our current electricity needs could be got from that source.

The question is more all-embracing than that: how well are we going to run our society? We have to look at all the carbon impact ingredients of everything we do. Urban life habits have to be totally integrated with rural practices if society is going to get energy conservationist, as it needs to be. The only solution is in going for the virtuous circle of no waste, total integration and a small net energy budget.

Ardtornish was doing well with its hydro investments but it is very Scottish to be able to rely on hydro. It is not available elsewhere, in parts of the country with lots of agricultural land but without water and hills. Instead, there was huge potential for example in advanced charcoal making, by the pyrolysis method which captured waste gas to make fuel oil and still more charcoal. The modern burners are highly tolerant of different sources of raw materials – wood chip, tree prunings, bark, seaweed, straw can all be converted. The massive wastage of the non-edible parts of crops – which at the moment simply decomposes, making methane which is the worst greenhouse gas – could all be used in this way. Cities could fund installation on farms of all sorts of microgeneration: photovoltaics (PV), small wind turbines and small hydro. Though these are currently costly, the first two in particular have the potential to become cheap mass market products. The amount of energy these technologies could generate is limited only by uptake and is therefore hugely price sensitive.

There is a huge potential for microgeneration:
60% of annual domestic hot water;
40% of annual domestic heat from automatic wood pellet boilers;
100% of annual space heating from superinsulation and airtight construction;
100% annual ventilation from passive heat recovery wind cowls;
85% annual electric demand from photovoltaic;
15% annual electric demand from community and micro wind.

The cost is not terrifying:

• Zero carbon-heating packages of solar tubes, pellet boiler and controls cost £5,000.
• Pellet consumption of 1 tonne a year cost £125
• Zero carbon electric package of 2 photovoltaic cells, inverter and mounts £10,000
• Total DIY cost circa £15,000-00 to £17,500-00 – with probably payback in about 12 years

The current average UK household fossil fuel cost is about £1,000 a year: £650 for gas and £350 for electricity. That would service a loan to fund the capital cost of the zero carbon installations at 6% a year.

70% of UK is below 50 houses/hectare and so schemes are required for less dense settlements. The ‘fit and forget’ technology already exists. Construction systems have been developed. But it is not happening. Why not? What are the barriers to us doing this now?

• No belief in technology: most people still think it is slightly off the wall
• Unaffordable: the lack of mass take-up and lack of mass production make installation costs expensive
• Do you want to live in it? A conservative reluctance to live in strange-looking houses
• Not enough people think it is necessary yet

So what are the routes to take?

First, don’t believe everyone is the same. Volume house-builders do that. The market is full of niches and so let’s make some inroads into the fiction of what is mass market.

Let’s make houses out of what we should be making them out of. Build some prototypes. Pre-negotiate volume discounts with suppliers. Make some high quality showpieces out of recycled materials like the Earth Centre at Doncaster, where almost everything is recycled. Convince people that houses don’t have to look the same.

Why insist on having 45 degree roofs made out of slate? What is the imperative for that? Instead, look for the inspiration around you. Use structured moss cladding for walls.

Imagine that rural housing can look like this development at Penryn in Cornwall which incorporates, a village hall for rent, craft workshops and affordable homes to rent.

Build with very thick walls, reducing heat demand by using a super-insulated envelope. Use traditional, simple and durable materials but in modern shapes.

Turf was used to build walls in rural Scotland; use it to clad roofs. Traditional aerodynamic building forms reduced heating need. Make building aerodynamic again. Use glasshouse structures to pre-heat incoming air.

The government has established a Code for Sustainable Housing in England. By 2016 it will be mandatory for any new building to comply with Code 6 by having a zero carbon footprint.

Bill’s company is just completing the UK’s first Code 6 terrace in Northampton.

Developers say it is impossible to build like this, largely on cost grounds. Bill is saying to the government ‘Don’t lose your nerve. As you get agreements up and down the supply chain, costs will come down. It only costs so much because no one is doing it. So there is a race on to get economies of scale. If you build factories producing these things, the whole country will benefit.’

In Upper Austria you can find showrooms full of woodpellet boilers, solar thermal collectors and so on. We are buying them. None of these components are made in the UK. They need to be.

EITHER:
Get some buildings up! Bill’s ruralZED houses are fast to build, (a ZED house was built in 3½ days with Polish and Lithuanian joiners) so build some now, have them inhabited by the autumn and monitor the results

OR:
Carry out endless desktop studies by developer-funded consultants with a vested interest in the failure of the Code.

If Code 6 is unaffordable, start with Code 3 and look for future upgradability:

• Use a simple plan (Complex plan forms cost more money)
• Make a glue-lam frame from local timbe
• Ventilate with a passive stack effect
• Lined with plaster made of fuel ash
• Terracotta blocks for the ceiling: light, easy, insulating
• Fireproof insulation for 120 years (Plastic insulation starts to crumble within 40-50 years)
• Timber windows (Plastic windows are a disaster)
• Put wind turbines on the ridge of roofs (they at least are being made in Edinburgh and Glasgow). Turbines mean moving into a carbon positive mode, so that the carbon cost of construction is eaten away by the positive contributions made by the turbine once the building is up and occupied.
• Install solar controlled blinds
• Harvest the sun with PV cells. There is more sun in the winter in Edinburgh than in London
• The surplus of electricity over the year would be enough to run an electric car
• Pre-engineered components: white van man can build it himself
• Train up communities to build these houses themselves.

All this is applicable to low-density situations, a set of very ordinary solutions but so much better than neo-Poundbury.

It is illogical not to design this way today.

You might like to start with a Land Ark: a totally sustainable, self- contained family life-pod.

Sustainable Housing in the Highlands – Susan Torrance

Susan Torrance began by describing the Highland Housing Alliance, of which she is the guiding light. It is a Company Limited by Guarantee, set up and owned by the Highland Council, five difference Housing Associations and two Trusts and it has been in action since 2005. Its purpose is to acquire and develop building land for both rural and urban affordable houses and to research and test new ways of providing affordable housing. It uses a £10 million revolving fund to do so. So far it has acquired ten sites, on which 857 units are at some stage in their development. Another ten sites are in the pipeline. The purpose of the alliance is simple enough: to build houses.

She outlined some definitions commonly used in discussions about housing. Susan and the housing organisations working in the Highlands don’t like the term ‘social housing’. It is laden with stigma, at worst means the housing no one else would like to live in and at best is the same as ‘affordable housing’, which means exactly what it says: housing that is affordable, particularly for those who cannot afford to buy or rent housing on the open market. There are policy definitions withing Planning Advice Note 74 and also within Highland Council Planning Development Policy documents, and in the main it does mean housing for rent or low cost ownership provided by Housing Associations using government grants. The definition of ‘rural housing’, has been the subject of much debate from the Randall Definition which looked at population densities as made by John Randall, at one time Registrar General for Scotland, to the best one Susan had heard of, which was that rural housing is any house more than 30 miles from an M&S. ‘Sustainable housing’ is housing that does not have an unnecessarily large carbon/climate impact in construction or use and is fit for living in by ordinary people in relation to design and amenity. ‘Market housing’ is housing sold by developers and others on the open market. Intermediate market housing is a new term for housing that sits between the defined versions of affordable housing and market housing, where individuals who would not get any preference for Housing Association properties may still get access to housing provided with much lower levels of public subsidy, or no subsidy at all through a benign developer who was not maximising profit.

The phrase ‘key workers’ often used in connection with housing provision, has no definition in Scotland at all. The other terms referred to are not all compatible or complimentary and often lead to confusion. The point is that both practitioners and the public find it difficult to understand what these terms all mean.

In order to develop sustainable housing, there are, first, material and building issues.
Is it going to last? Is it easy to maintain, repair and replace elements? Does it use components which have not taken a long time to get here? Are those components environmentally friendly? How do I know? Is it cheap to run, heat and fuel efficient and not reliant on expensive fossil fuels?

Next, there are people issues. Is public transport available? Is it close to doctor’s surgeries and hospitals? Are there amenity, play and community facilities nearby – a village hall, a church, a pub? And what about costs – rent, mortgage, running costs? Is the design of housing sustainable? Is it extendable, is there storage space, are the rooms regular-sized to fit regular-sized furniture? Is it a lifetime home? If you get old or have an accident, can you stay there? A sustainable home must have an understanding and accommodation of disability totally integrated into its design, both for people living there and for visitors.

All this sounds good, but it is difficult to deliver in a rural context, more difficult than in the city. There is a conflict between increasing prescription of different sets of standards – sustainability guidelines, building regulations, energy efficiency ratings. All drive up costs. It is rare that sites hitting all sustainable community targets become available, and one is repeatedly making compromises. In particular, the cost of developing such housing is often unaffordable, unless the land comes cheap or free. The land cost makes all the difference. A major stumbling block is the duty of care imposed on public sector bodies to get the best value they can for development land. That requirement often rules out the possibility of sustainable affordable development on public land because the grant available to affordable housing providers does not cover a market land price. We are a long way from integrating these various requirements.

We want buoyant rural communities and housing is central to that wish. There will be no new people in communities if there are no houses for them. But in rural situations, services and infrastructure are both expensive. Modern design requirements are often expensive and invariably the first thing engineered out of a high-cost project. The Highlands are characterised by low wages and the high cost of living, which stretches the equations. There is a lot of the wrong kind of land and there is a widespread ideological barrier: the Highlands are considered Europe’s Last Wilderness, an enormous Wildlife Park where more people are not required. There are conflicts between ‘real locals’, ‘new locals’ and ‘prospective locals’.

There are some grounds for optimism. The Government has the aspiration to build 35,000 new homes in Scotland in the next three years. A substantial number of them will be affordable. There will be stamp duty exemption for low emissions building methods. But there are also grounds for anxiety. There is heavy competition for government funding and any reliance on cross-subsidisation by developers on the basis of Section 75 planning requirements for 25% of all new developments over 10 units to be affordable has disappeared with the credit crunch. The housing world changed dramatically in the spring of 2008. The sharp downturn in house sales has meant frozen sites, redundancies, house values starting to drop, mortgages either expensive or unavailable. Any opportunity to cross-subsidise is entirely dependent on a buoyant private sector, which is unlikely to re-appear for two or maybe three years. The only possible glimmer is that the lack of competition in the open market will allow the affordable housing sector to pick up sites and houses relatively cheaply.

The private housing market in Scotland has had it easy. Up until the Code for Sustainable Homes was published for England in 2006 and Scottish Building Regulations changed in April 2007, there was little incentive for any builder to invest in moves to carbon neutrality. Some were building 30-year-old house designs and sold everything they built at the height of the housing market. Now the developers know they are at a crossroads – they have to do something, to comply with new guidance and legislation, but this year, with the money from house sales drying up, is the worst time to invest in R & D.

The real winners have been landowners who have surfed in on high increases in land values. But those high land values meant that only expensive houses, with large profit margins, can swallow the land cost and make the overall sums work. And the gap in the Highlands between the lowest possible price for a house and the housing that is affordable on the lowest possible wage still remains wide. For the last 5-10 years no one in the Highlands on an average wage has been able to buy even a first-time-buyer home. Even a £20,000 wage will not buy the lowest priced properties and there is no supply of smaller or hyper-low-priced properties for those first-time buyers. Plots for self-build have also dried up, because of planning restrictions on new housing in the countryside.

In the light of all that, how can we afford sustainability? People need a good source of neutral advice and the government should establish a Sustainability Advice Service. Information and grants are far too diverse and difficult to obtain. The focus should be on what makes the savings: insulation alone often brings biggest benefits. The reduced annual running costs from high standards of insulation are very marketable for a new home buyer. Biomass boilers should look like a better option if oil price continues to be high. The reliability of wood pellet boilers may increase and capital costs decrease. Young people may be persuaded to go green on ideological grounds. Green grants need to be easy to obtain and cover the bulk of the cost. Mortgages for sustainable houses could be subsidised. Whole life costings relating to repair and running costs should also be used to make judgements about value in public housing investment.

The current situation in the market is bad. There is a desperate need for houses, but no one is going to be building them for the next 12 months at least. Long term public investment needs to be made in community-owned energy producing infrastructure. R & D needs to be conducted into local solutions to biomass, solar, water, drainage and the use of materials. People need to understand that plonking a bit of timber cladding on a house, if it comes from Latvia, may look green, but isn’t.

Are there any solutions to this deeply difficult set of problems? The Housing Association have agreed ten standard house modules from which you can construct 40 different house types. Using Scottish timber and panel construction. These are to be factory produced. They are standard internally but you can have whatever you want outside. Such standardisation fixes the superstructure cost. They have innovative insulation and air source heat pumps built into them so any buyer or tenant is sure of energy savings. We are so confident of savings, we are offering to pay the first two years heating costs. They can be built anywhere in the Highlands but the advantages of a volume contract are that they can be erected in rural areas at the same price as in the city. A further option is for the buyer to part-build the house after the Alliance has erected the basic shell, putting in their sweat equity, or even to buy a serviced plot and do the rest themselves.

But the key remains land and land availability. Across the Highlands as a whole, better information and support to communities needs to be provided – especially for community buy-outs. People don’t want any more wishy-washy pilots, but real energy-efficient houses and real ways for people to buy or rent. That is the only route for sustainability in my view.

Saturday morning discussion

Various connected themes emerged from the discussion following Bill Dunster’s and Susan Torrance’s presentations.

Mindset
If housing could be cracked, everything else would fall into place.
Housing or the lack of it: unless we can solve that everything else is a waste of time and effort.

Most of the problem is not in the technology, its lack or untestedness: is it in people’s minds. Waste for example is a potential resource. We should all start to think creatively about waste. The permaculture idea always tried to identify the potential for a system to be a net producer of energy. That should be mainstreamed.

Services – water, waste and power – often introduced as a hurdle to sustainable affordable rural development, can in fact be easily addressed. It is only the regulatory context which stops that happening. SEPA and Scottish Water strew obstacles in the path of would-be sustainable developers.

According to Code 6, the requirement per person per day is 80 litres of water. The current Scottish water design requirement is 223 litres per person per day. That is ridiculous. Water is energy use and it is quite possible for all Scottish homes to be autonomous in water. Australian houses all have big tanks attached to them. We don’t need piped water. 1-3% of water is used for drinking; the rest for washing, loos etc. This one change could unlock development sites throughout Scotland.

Sustainable technologies aren’t new or problematic. They are really simple: plug and play. No consultants are required. Often the cost of the consultancy is the same as the cost of the equipment. So take the consultants out. Let’s be real. Ten different housing types can provide 90% of homes. Deliver a kit of parts. Bulk buy. Pre-test. Encourage DIY. The problem is in people’s heads. If we wanted to sort it out we would do it in a week.

Politics and Persuasion
Local-global relations need to be established in people’s minds. Win the PR stunt. Do a coffin count for climate change. Average UK family over the next four generations will kill the same number of people as themselves in a climate hot spot. Carbon must be rationed.

The government needs to admit the reality of peak oil, peak gas, peak nuclear. Public doesn’t yet understand fuel price is going to go up for ever. If it doesn’t understand, it can’t act.

The Planning System
Planning Authorities are ponderous; over-systematised; non-responsive.

Affordable housing has been at the top of the agenda for the sustainable economic life of communities in the uplands and islands for 30 years but barriers to progress litter the planning system. It still thinks in an urban way and tries to apply urban answers to rural problems.

It is not easy being a planner. Local Authority members and lobby groups make their life difficult. The workload is intense. They are underfunded, morale is on the floor. Very little new blood coming into the profession. The key to rural development is to break down institutional barriers between agencies and organisations that deal with rural economic development and housing in separate boxes.

People are working in silos.

In planning there seems to be a chain of barriers or a melting pot of opportunity. The heavy burden of the regulatory framework needs to be lifted away

The new planning act is meant to speed up community connections. Everyone wants a far more open dialogue, a common culture to ground communications between people and planners. A black/white, yes/no dialogue is not what is wanted, which is much more open, nuanced, flexible, future-orientated, community-responsive structure.

Why haven’t we cracked it? There have been lots of reports and recommendations. But the obstacles are not technical, but political. Why do people with power not want this issue solved? Who has interest in a non-solution? Answer: Urban groups and powerful rural groups.

Housing development is a long-term thing, typically 5 to 6 years. And so planning has got to be ahead of economic requirements. Businesses can’t wait that time to relocate. Communities need to be able to articulate their needs and ambitions.

Housing development forums need to be established in each area.

All ideas should from the beginning be put in one pot so that there is an early coordination of ideas and ambitions.

Social Structures
Economic development and housing have to go hand in hand.

Nobody wants dormitories.

The key is in community-based connected thinking about energy, waste, housing, economy and jobs, so that the actions of the community itself develop independence and confidence, reducing reliance on public utilities, power, electricity and sewerage. The virtue of community self-sufficiency.

Not only the unplugged house but the unplugged community?

Communities have the tools to solve their own problems.

Imagine your own future. Make up your own theme. Make it good yourselves.

Can remote rural areas such as Morvern repackage themselves as transition communities?

Each community could develop a master plan to create jobs/build houses, harvest renewables, a self-confirming process.

There is a question of density and self-sufficiency. Do you need space to be self-sufficient? And so are rural places better placed because of that?

Land
A key element is the cost of land. A crofter can get a loan of £80 to £100k for a 3-bed house. If the site costs £100k, he is stuffed.

In Austria, market mechanisms are providing affordable sustainable housing. Why are we so far behind? Why is there so little innovation in house construction? The houses that are built now are the same as they were 40 or even 50 years ago.
Answer: because house builders make money out of land speculation not out of house building.

What we need is a system that rewards innovation in house building not land speculation.

Land with planning permission needs to flood the market.

The Forestry Commission has developed woodland croft pilots in which land is given away with a woodland livelihood and home. The major barrier is the requirement to safeguard the public interest in the land value. Land transferred to grazing committees maybe an answer.

The neglected virtues of the private rented sector
The problem for poor families is how to maintain their houses. This will get worse as the fuel price rises.

The rented sector is very important in resolving issues. In communities below 1000 people (a large town in Scottish rural terms) the proportion of rented housing belong to
 Housing Association is 5%
 Local Authorities 42%
 Private Rented Sector 53% (all 2001 figures)

There has been a longstanding attempt to quash the private rented sector by the government.

The tax and grant system discriminates against the private rented sector. Of £400million of Community Scotland’s budget for the provision of rented housing 99.7% is directed at Housing Associations. Despite their role in the market, private landlords aren’t given a look in.

Technology
Not all technological solutions fit. Something that would work in BedZED wouldn’t work in Shetland. Cowls would blow away in days. But how is Shetland to maximise the 24 hours of sunshine it gets for 3 weeks every summer?

A super-insulated house is the key. Heat demand is so low that almost no micro-generation is needed.

We should install mini-methane powered turbines from sewage.

High fuel prices mean that existing houses are now unaffordable. But they represent large quantities of embedded energy and so should be retro-fitted. Is there a company to do retrofitting?

Saturday afternoon - Outing to see housing in Morvern

The party took a bus to visit, first, three houses recently built on the outskirts of Lochaline, on land sold by the estate to the owner occupiers, and with strict aesthetic guidelines attached. Building them had not been easy. The Highland Council, for example, insisted that there should be new pedestrian access from the houses to the village and then charged the developers £20,000 for the right to lay the required path across a 3-yard wide stretch of ground owned by the council and lying between the new houses and the village. The builder said he would never build a house here again. But the results look at home in the landscape.

We then went on to look at the site of the proposed new township at Achabeg, a couple of miles to the west along the road to Drimnin and overlooking the Sound of Mull. The Highland Council was keen to re-establish townships, near settlements but not in them, between six and twelve miles from existing centres. There were several possibilities along this shore – at Achabeg, Achnaha, Savary and Fiunary, all on the best agricultural land retained by Owen Hugh Smith in 1930 when the hill land above was sold to the Forestry Commission. As Angus had described, the estate had invested in a masterplan for Achabeg, chosen because the lie of the land meant that new houses both above and below the road would be invisible to traffic on it. The proposal had been incorporated in the Council’s Local Plan and its development was now ‘almost a likelihood’.

There was electricity on the land already but water was a problem. No good source had been identified and either boreholes or bringing it in from further afield would be very expensive. The plan was to have a mix of affordable and market housing. One plot above the road had already been sold to a couple from Lochaline who were key workers and were keen to stay in Morvern and keep their horses on a piece of land, which they were renting from the estate. (One of the new owners is a horse podiatrist.) A neighbour had already object to the possibility of the horses fouling the burn, whose capacity had yet to be proved anyway.

The benefit of the development for the estate would be to release the value of the land which could then be invested in income-earning renewable energy schemes, and to enhance the social vitality of the peninsula. The ideal would be to nurture people with high value skills, and not to be confronted by streams of builders’ vans coming into Morvern every Monday morning. Between £5 and £10 million would be spent here in the next few years and that was big enough to bring families in. The fish farms 15 years ago had brought twenty good jobs into Morvern and this would also be a form of kick-starting a new layer of enterprise here. The estate might be the developer or it might go into a partnership with a local developer. There would certainly be cross-subsidisation of affordable housing from the housing market. It should be remembered that this was a new situation in Morvern. Not until 5 years ago had anyone in human history ever seen a return on housing here. For now, it was watch this space.

Finally, the party went on to visit two timber-framed houses on the shore of the Sound, both designed by Roderick James, examples of high quality, landscape-responsive building in sustainable materials of a kind which enhances the landscape by returning to it a sense of ‘occupation’.

Saturday Evening

Professor Pete Smith, Internationally recognized expert on aspects of climate change, author of various IPCC reports, and last year’s key note speaker

Professor Smith confessed he knew ‘bugger all’ about sustainable, affordable housing. But he did know that the world’s annual CO2 emissions are now greater than the worst case scenario of the projections made on the basis of data gathered between 1990 and 2000.

Strong leadership is needed. Climate control must be enshrined in legislation. The biggest mitigation potential of CO2 emissions is in buildings. Some really big gains can be made in that sector with big sustainability and climate impacts.

He then also showed a slide of a ‘marginal abatement cost curve’:

This shows the effective cost in euros, per tonne of CO2 equivalent saved, of implementing different strategies to reduce the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere. Building insulation actually saves more than 150 euros (largely through reduced fuel bills) for every tonne of CO2 that is not released into the atmosphere. Four of the top five most cost-effective mitigation strategies are in the building sector.

The graph emphasises the value of retrofitting buildings for a carbon-conscious age and has a clear political implication: make incentives real for real change (although the high cost of fuel will do a lot of that work for the government through straightforward consumer choice.) A nuclear power station, as a way of preventing CO2 emissions, is 150 times more expensive than insulating buildings.

David Kinsey, a planner from New Jersey

David Kinsey gave an American perspective on the discussion.

Much was familiar from the other side of the pond: people working in silos; the long-term nature of the challenges. He spoke about ‘Smart Growth,’ a pattern of development and conservation that was environmentally and economically sustainable and socially equitable. It was a concept used by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the National Association of Housebuilders.

Smart Growth can operate on all kinds of scales and in all kinds of settings, urban, suburban and exurban.

It’s principal qualities:

• Compact
• Walkable – a sea-change for Americans
• Friendly to transit and land use
• Variety of house types and tenures
• Open spaces, recreation – at all scales
• Protecting environmentally sensitive land
• Streamlined – expedited decision making, which is part of equity too – with different parts of government talking to each other
• Conscious of climate change.

New development: how does one sell these plots to old locals, new locals, newcomers? What kind of community is desired?

A useful tool is the ‘deed restriction’ which is applicable up to 30 years or longer. An estate selling plots could provide a reverter clause: i.e. if a sale of a house is made, the sale must be to the estate. This would prevent speculators moving in. The heart of smart growth is that the original intentions are to be kept in place for a long time.

Saturday Evening Discussion
Problems with applying ‘Smart Growth’ to British developments

The pre-emptive right to buy raises some issues of social justice. Does it put too much power (and prospect of gain) in the landlord’s hands?

Requirements for developments to be compact and walkable are both anti-rural. Think what the consequences are in economic and social terms of those requirements. They mean fewer sites and that means more expensive and less affordable sites. Smart Growth is anti-equitable.

Settlement patterns are historically unnucleated in the Highlands. There has been 60-70 years of prevention of sprawl, green belts and tight envelopes in this country. The consequences have been a strangulated land market, a denial of opportunity to the young and the poor.

The housing crisis in the Highlands
There are not enough houses in many places, a lack of supply which is letting young people down. More importantly, this social failure is significant for what we are as a culture. The housing question is about aspiration, how we live and how we want to live.

Scotland has some of the worst housing in Europe, a widespread sign of what we have been doing wrong. But architecture can be a power for good.

Services are difficult but can be overcome. And the planning policies are not bad. SPP15 is a great document. SPP6 on renewables is good too. There is a requiremen that anything of 500 sq metres and up must look to reduce CO2 emissions by 15%. That could be used to shape developments but it is simply not used. Planning Advice Note 84 – reducing carbon emissions in new development – it is all there.

The planning system is up to speed. But market innovation? There is none. Developers don’t do innovation. They do housing.
Affordable sustainable housing. Problem is that sustainability puts 20-25% on the cost. How are we going to do that with the current cost structure? Should we give people sites and a little bit of money?

People can’t see a start. They can’t stay in their own country. They are disempowered and we need to do something about this.

In more general terms, this also looks like a turning point. Scottish housing in the 1980s was a question of municipal monopolies. Scotland has one of the lowest levels of owner occupation in the UK (64%), but has seen the fastest growth in home ownership over the past ten years (12%) – three times the average UK growth, according to new research from Bank of Scotland.

What’s going to happen now? Something new is going to be born. It will be different.
Something is going to happen in housing finance.

We have been changing the rules and costs are going up like mad. In 1980s, the population of Scotland was flat. Now the population is growing and the number of households is growing. There will be supply pressure for the first time since the 1970s. Wages are low and unaffordability will come in early. How are we to address that?

Why is development so difficult to get right?
Scots are good at objecting. Maybe because most of what is built is so crap. People need to do better at welcoming development. Design needs to be better.

It should be about choices and aspirations. If you build houses, people will come and live in them. If you don’t they won’t.

What is the countryside for? Not just thin city. Surely there is something more about living in the countryside than that. What are the possibilities and opportunities? Trees are worth three times what they were two years ago. (But that is only getting back to the timber prices of the 80s).

Accounting for the needs of the unheard future
The only certainty about population predictions is that they are all wrong. The director of Education from Inverness told one village meeting that their primary school was to be closed as the population was on the slide. A large formidable lady stood up. ‘I don’t know, Mr Director, how you can be certain what I will be doing in bed tonight.’

In-migration has totally changed the position in the Highlands. It is very important to make provision for young people who might like to live here.

Why is there so much opposition to development? More emphasis needs to be given to those who might benefit from development not just those who dislike it. Objectors are usually wealthy, articulate, organised and know the system. The young benefitters are not like that. People who aren’t yet here, but would like to be, are unheard. The reactionary gets all the weight attached to his view.

Grant Framework
According to the Scottish Rural Development Plan (SRDP), options are limited, but less than before. CAP money under Pillar 1 will go on the Single Farm Payment; under Pillar 2 it will encourage wider range of rural development. The SRDP will spend that money on Less Favoured Areas and Crofting, and with an emphasis on regional priorities including regeneration, modernisation and diversification of rural businesses. Economic opportunity needs to be integrated with housing provision.

The Rural Private Rented Sector
Rural private rented sector is a major player with policies stacked against it. The activity of this sector should be nurtured not squashed.

Focus has been on the method of delivery rather than the product. So £100s of millions has gone to Housing Associations but not to private landlords. In 1999 the Kincardine estate put 14 houses on the ground with a 32% grant towards capital costs. A Housing Association would have built 8 houses with the same money. Private rented housing is a value for money solution.

But there are big problems ahead, in the form of capital taxation on high property values. Renting out houses is not regarded as business by the Treasury so 40% of the value is taken out at each transfer by death or sale. It would take 140 years of rents to pay that tax. The result of this tax regime is that tenancies are not renewed, the houses are sold, and people move from renting from a private landlord to depending on the state for housing provision.

The Treasury treats publicly owned rented housing completely differently.

Of all the houses that will exist in 2100, half have already been built. Old houses will have to be retro-fitted but there is no incentive for a landlord to spend that money when savings will be to the tenant. According to current rules, if a landlord puts up rent to recover the costs of investment in insulation, that contravenes grant conditions.

Achabeg proposals
The Achabeg site is fantastic. It could be a powerful example if something like that could grow. The estate must take a chance on this, make a mixture of affordable and marketable houses.

Houses symbolize our culture. We live in such a wasteful culture. People will look at our houses and say what a pile of trash we have made. They embody the lack of commitment to the area in which we live. We need to be committed to making better houses.

Land Value
The elephant in the room is land value. Too much value of a house is in the land value.

Free land will result in good affordable housing.

The land value has to be taken out of the equation by locking it in.

Those in a leadership position should lead. Ardtornish should lead. It is a benevolent minded landlord, in a position to demonstrate that it wants a more equitable society.

There is a lot of land in private ownership. Landlords are not getting a return on it now. So surrender that to the community. Make it affordable. Do you want to do it? That is the question.

A group of landowners might be persuaded to give land; little works as well as peer pressure. They could all give land on the edge of their villages.

Ardtornish is in a difficult legal position. It is able to sell land below market value, because it is developing the community and Ardtornish has a financial interest in a buoyant community. But because of a complex system of trust ownership, and a company run by its directors, company law obliges the directors of the Ardtornish Estate Company to maximise shareholder value. The company can’t give things away and justify it financially or legally.

No one should put too much responsibility or guilt on the Ardtornish estate before we have eaten their dinner.

Sunday morning: Four Brief Talks

1. Angela Williams, Development Manager, Knoydart Foundation.

Shared Equity and Land Value

The community on Knoydart consists of 116 people living in mixed accommodation, including rented and private. In 1999 a community buyout of the remains of the Knoydart estate took place (more information available on the foundation website www.knoydart-foundation.com).

8 years ago, residents on Knoydart approached the Knoydart Foundation (KF) about purchasing land on which to build homes. There were ten interested parties. Valuations were made, and after a long discussion the KF Board agreed to sell at market value with no conditions and three plots were sold.

The community in the main was not happy. KF assets were not protected and a market dominated by holiday home buyers meant that houses were likely to be taken out of the affordable bracket. The community felt angry and went back to the KF Board asking them to address this.

What did we want? A housing policy that created affordable houses in Knoydart, allowed people to live and work there, was a sustainable form of development and supported the community. A new policy was agreed in November 2006, with a commitment to develop a ‘sale of land’ policy that met these criteria.

The new policy for the sale of land made use of the Title Conditions Act 2003, which allows the creation of rural housing burdens – a right of pre-emption, in effect a buy-back clause favouring the Foundation. These burdens can only be imposed by a rural housing body with social objectives, but a third party, for example a Housing Trust, can put a right of pre-emption on too.

But on their own pre-emptive clauses are not enough. They wouldn’t necessarily reduce the price – and could Knoydart be sure that it could afford to buy back properties that were for sale? And they wouldn’t prevent properties being bought for holiday homes, which would diminish the year-round vitality of the community. Holiday makers would happily forego the development value of the land.

So we considered our options for lowering the cost. We had to manoeuvre around ‘local opinion’ – with concerns from some private home owners who think people are getting cheap plots, thus eroding the capital value of their own houses. And be aware of OSCR (Office of the Scottish Charities Regulator) rules on benefits to members.

We decided after many long discussions to go for a ‘Shared Equity’ approach, by which the Knoydart Foundation retains an interest in plots and buildings. As a method, it separates out speculators from people who want to live and work on Knoydart. It is not shared ownership. It is based on market value, and it is not about free or cheap plots. But we hope it can make housing affordable for more people. The work was done using the Foundation’s own funds, grant aid, commercial mortgages and volunteer time.

The Foundation originally owned five properties, all run down; two had been condemned but were still in use. Now it owns six properties, 3 refurbished, 2 still need doing, 1 bedsit, 2 A- frames for temporary workers.

An example of shared Equity at work
A purchaser is evaluated on eligibility criteria which are in the process of being finalised. A plot is valued by District Valuer at say £50,000; the house costs £100,000 to build. Total plot value once built upon - £150k (whether contractor or self-built). KF takes 33% equity (could be as low as 20%). Land is sold to purchaser. No money exchanges hands (in this example) although in practice we are hoping to see an exchange of money of around £5k. Purchase pays contractor (or self-builds).

The KF 33% stays on title in perpetuity, whoever buys in the future. In effect a house worth £150,000 is bought and sold for £100,000 and so the house remains in the affordable market – especially for purchasers with access to a Rural Home Ownership Grant. The inflated land value is locked into the house and so removed from the deal.

We are also looking at putting on a standard security to reduce the chance of the property becoming a holiday home. Ideally we get some cash but may not be able to.

2. Unattributed contribution

Planning at the moment is seen as an exercise in survival. It needs to be seen as a set of opportunities.

Third party right of appeal is nearly there: i.e. nothing can be done unless everyone thinks it should be done. Is that right/is it a straitjacket? The planners are being squeezed by the pressures they are under, not directing but responding, not planning but coping.

There needs to be a different conversation, much more directorial, in effect planning by decree. We should try codes not guidance and there should be mandatory standards in those codes.

This would be a form of positive planning which would get away from the arbitration process which planning has now become. We would go back to planning as shaper. We should be thinking of changing places – making them better.

For this to happen there has to be a change in the profession, which is battered and lacking in confidence. We must improve their status, allow them to have a vision of the development of the country. We need to get somewhere that people actually want this stuff. And we must make the absent voices heard. Public policy must articulate them.

3. Marta McGlynn, Landscape Architect.

Design

Remember Nutwood, Rupert Bear’s village? Mrs Bear was happy out walking. Peter Penguin was ecstatic skating on the pond. It gave a complete image of what it was like to be Rupert Bear, and how good it was to be Rupert Bear. That is what is needed: a completely enveloping picture of the good place. It needs, first, an inspirational high aesthetic quality. Any other problems are likely to be much less if people are confronted with the beauty of the place at every turn and in every detail.

It also needs to be conceivable of itself as a community from the very beginning. A single house may have all the attributes of, say energy conservation, but if it is in the middle of nowhere, and entails a 50 mile commute to work every day by car, the same for children going to school, and shopping, then it is not really ‘sustainable.’ There are many examples now of individual houses which demonstrate aspects of environmental sustainability. We need to move on from prototypes to look at the wider picture and bring it into the mainstream by looking at communities.

What would a sustainable community look like?
The Patrick Geddes triangle:

This model demonstrated the interconnection of the crucial aspects of society, to be used as a planning tool, for him, in the creation of a Utopian (at that time, increasingly urban) society. See www.patrickgeddes.co.uk This might be the Geddesian model for sustainable social and affordable development in a rural context:

with ENERGY as the central driver of a prospective planning model i.e. there should be a strong connection between home, work and land. In this model, long distance commuting for work (by car) would be a low order of priority, whereas local work, associated with the land would be a high order of priority. Food grown locally on local land would save on shopping miles and make the local community more economically sustainable. Second homes, or retirement homes would be a low order of priority, unless there was a connection to work the land in some way. (That could be by employing someone to do the working, but it would mean a commitment to the land). Ideally, of course, public transport connections would be good – at present, not a characteristic of rural communities.

4. Chris Morgan, Architect

Retrofit

Retrofitting the existing housing stock is more important than building new zero carbon houses because it represents the bulk of the problem. It is a huge issue which can’t be put off. However, it is much harder to tackle than new-build.

The offset response to the carbon crisis is like saying you can cheat on your lover as long as you can pay someone else to stay faithful to theirs.

We must conserve energy first, then use renewables to provide the small amount of outstanding energy input you need. Insulation is the key along with air-tightness and good ventilation. 40% of heat loss is through air leakage in buildings. Effective insulation, secondary/double glazing and draught-stripping and other basic things like lagging cylinders and hot pipes can easily halve the energy use of the whole house. Getting a ¾ reduction becomes more tricky and expensive, getting to 90% gets harder still and at this point it is usually better to turn to renewables for supply

Although natural materials are better for you and greener, this is little cultural confidence about using them. Natural materials can also be advantageous as they can deal well not only with energy but moisture, which can make buildings more energy efficient and healthier. For example, there is rarely any need to do chemical treatment of timber if designed well and this reduces the toxic risk to people, but also means the timber can be safely composted at the end of its life. Older buildings are much better built and easier to refurbish.

We must reduce water use. This is easiest with simple conservation fittings such as low flush WCs and spray taps for basins.

The cost of being ill is often associated with poor housing. Better housing will save the NHS vast amounts of money, which can then be spent on warheads (or bailing banks out! – ed)

Final Discussion

The central interaction is between Planning and Community. Land Value and Unheard Voices are major satellite issues.

Planning
Local Authority experience is that total system control is probably incorrect. There are too many variables to make it workable. It gets clogged with itself. The only time anything happens is when it is propelled by ignorance and anarchy.

Should we have areas which are free of the planning system? (It’s called the West Coast of Ireland). No planning restrictions would suppress land value, which would be bad for some, not for others.

Planning works well if it engages community in the planning process on an open, continuous and early basis.

People need to think of affordable houses for themselves.

Start with nothing on paper. Hold meeting after meeting. The designer is only there to interpret people’s good ideas.

Why shouldn’t people want to be involved in something from the beginning? Equitable beginnings produce equitable results.

But doesn’t endless community involvement also produce its own viscosity/sluggishness?

Perhaps we have to risk the hacienda, if there is to be a community gain.

People wanting to make a change have been incredibly frustrated by the planning system. The funding of the planning system is short and their practice of consultation is getting worse not better.

Unheard voices
Residents object; tenants and young people aren’t heard. Councillors represent people who have phoned them up; planning officers hold the envelope against new housing (whose beneficiaries are the unheard); Central government advice says new housing is needed, local plans are against it. But those plans are often 35 years old; there is a terrible lag; a viscosity pond.

Young people and the rural poor are excluded from decision making. A new approach to rural governance is required which incorporates them.

Community
Collective action is the key. People need to imagine the future of their place. This is not about a free-for-all but a ‘yes’ to what the community wants.

Connection is all: school to kids to families to housing to network of people, all involved in an imagined and integrated future.

Real need
The crunch difficulty for housing providers is in choosing between high priority outsiders and low priority locals. The choice is invidious and so the biggest need now is affordable rented housing.

Land Value
It is not the land that has the value but the planning permission. Land is worth £3k an acre without planning permission; with planning permission, its value rises to £500k an acre.

It is a question of supply: if more land was made available for building, the value of the planning permission would plummet.

Estates don’t always make a fortune from building developments because they won’t sell the developed properties and so don’t realize the increased land value. But the increased value of land on which houses are built for rent is subject to inheritance tax and so there is a heavy disincentive for estates to build new housing: no value realized except when it comes the tax point. Solution? Allow private rented property to be taxed on a business basis.

Achabeg Plans
A good thing. If things had happened differently in the 19th and early 20th century, there would have been houses all the way along the Sound of Mull shore, as there are in Ardnamurchan and Sleat. We would take it for granted. We wouldn’t say no houses at all unless we were Patrick Sellar. It is not right for the estate to carry the burden of this development. Ardtornish is a very small business. Not since 1900 has anyone created an entirely new settlement from scratch. It would be really good to do it with all these inputs. Go back to a peopled landscape. There are fewer people in Morvern today than at any time in the last 5,000 years.

At some moment we have to do something to take a risk, make a living thing.