View from Bridport
Last week, Parliament had one of those splendid moments when everybody does the opposite of what everybody thinks that Parliament does.
We agreed about something.
The agreement in question was about community land trusts.
There was a little “debate”, initiated by a Labour backbencher. Her support for community land trusts was echoed by those of us who spoke from the Conservative benches. The Liberals pitched in with enthusiastic support, too. And there was, in short, no sign of dissent anywhere.
This is good news – because community land trusts are a very good thing.
The idea is simple. A trust is established – like the one in Buckland Newton, here in West Dorset. The trust is backed by the parish council and its sole purpose is to help local people get affordable housing.
The idea is that the houses it builds are either rented to locals or are partly sold to locals, who then have to sell them back to the trust if they want to move out, so that they can be sold on to someone else local in due course. So they stay there for the community permanently.
Because of this social purpose, the houses can be built on so-called “exception sites” outside the development boundary of a village — which means that the land is much, much cheaper than development land normally is. The houses can therefore be built and part-sold or rented at much lower prices than normal.
The wonderful thing is that, because the community land trusts (unlike normal housing associations) are set up for locals, they can give preference to locals and are therefore welcomed by locals. So people actually get behind a development, instead of rising up and opposing it, as they would undoubtedly would if it descended on them from the headquarters of some great national developer under the inspiration of a dreadful sequence of national, regional and county house-building targets.
I suppose the reason why everybody in Parliament is in favour of these community land trusts is that they are so obviously a good idea.
But it is also an interesting example of an idea that crosses political boundaries. It is attractive to Labour politicians because it is about affordable housing. It is attractive to Liberal Democrats because it is about local endeavour. And it is attractive to Conservatives because it is a way of allowing communities to take responsibility for their own futures instead of everything being determined by some remote bureaucracy.
This gives cause for optimism. There really are times when different political traditions converge like the beams of a laser on something that has genuine merit.