‘No quick fixes to ending island’s housing crisis’
There are no quick fixes to ending the island’s housing crisis due to a range of ‘acute’ impacts currently at play, Environment & Infrastructure president Lindsay de Sausmarez has warned.
Her comments were made at a public hearing held by the Scrutiny Management Committee with E&I at the Castel Douzaine Room yesterday afternoon.
In response to a question from SMC president Yvonne Burford, asking whether the island had the capacity to solve the housing crisis in the foreseeable future, if the population continued to increase above the net inward migration figure of 300 modelled for in the Guernsey Housing Plan, Deputy de Sausmarez said that E&I was obliged to review that modelling every year and was expecting updated modelling to be done around the middle of this year.
‘I think that’s going to be quite a critical exercise because it will show us the gap between need and delivery.’
She said it would be a mistake to look at the housing crisis as a ‘binary win or lose’, adding that there was a spectrum of impacts which happened to be acute at the present time.
‘In terms of meeting the need for housing then I think we can get a lot closer to it than we have been historically, but I think one thing that the housing plan stresses is that there are no quick fixes.
‘It is really important that we advance various work streams simultaneously, so that we can take a much more joined up, and therefore a much more effective approach.’
Some of those work streams, she said, included matching supply with demand and vice versa, accessibility and affordability of housing.
ISLANDERS STUCK IN HOMES TOO BIG FOR THEM
Islanders ‘stuck’ in houses too big for them and unable to downsize or ‘right-size’ effectively is proving an issue in the housing market, Lindsay de Sausmarez warned.
She said the ‘mismatch’ of people living in house sizes that were not the right size for them was a problem.
This primarily involved individuals or couples still living in a family-sized home after their children had grown up and left the nest.
She said that these people had too many barriers to contend with when looking for alternative accommodation, including cost and lack of suitable options, and added that her committee was looking at how to enable people to ‘right-size’.
‘It could take some of the pressure off the need to produce quite as many new homes, and it could actually be part of the solution and help to ease the negative impacts that the community is currently feeling by making the market work more effectively,’ she said.
