Community coercion

A plan proposed by the Yorkshire Dales national park to restrict new housing for locals highlights the desperate state in which many communities now find themselves.

Local residents are being priced out of the local housing market in many parts of the country from rural idylls like the Dales to the densely populated boroughs of London.

The proposals at the heart of this latest scheme to tackle the crisis are certainly innovative. But the long-term implications are potentially very damaging, particularly if the principle is adopted nationwide.

It is of course right that people should be able to buy their own home in their own local area. But it is equally right that people moving from outside an area, whether for personal or professional reasons, should be able to buy a home of their choosing.

This issue should not be confused with second homes. We are dealing here with the principal family home and surely it is unfair to deny people the full choice of property on sale in that local market. This proposal, while very well-intentioned, flies in the face of the principles of a free market and could potentially jeopardise the mobilisation of people and professional services.

It could deter doctors moving to the area, for example, or it might simply put off children moving closer to frail elderly parents.

In the long term, it may also result in falling land prices which would make landowners reluctant to sell, thereby choking up the supply of sites for housebuilding.

In addition, it could make developers less likely to seek new sites in the first place. If their market is restricted to local residents, then the process of selling new stock may slow, making their profit returns more doubtful. Moreover, if owners of these new homes are restricted to selling to locals, they may find for this very reason that house prices do not keep up with those in neighbouring areas.

Such a restriction could stigmatise new housing and create an immense bureaucracy to define eligibility which would be open to all sorts of potential loopholes.

Of course, new housing represents only a fraction of the overall housing stock but it is the principle of this proposal which is questionable.

We believe that there needs to be an annual construction target of at least 250,000 dwellings if we are to keep up with the rate of household formation and make some modest inroad into clearing the backlog of housing need in this country.

We would also like to see greater encouragement of the provision of accommodation directly by employers, assembling large-scale areas of brownfield land for housing development, a more active use by public bodies of compulsory purchase powers and an end to the anomalous system of VAT rates which favour new build over repair and refurbishment.

We fully appreciate the motives behind the Dales proposal. But it is crystal clear that too many are struggling to get a foot on the property ladder and we believe that schemes such as this could ultimately cause more harm than good.

· Oliver Foster is a senior policy officer at the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors