He would like to identify a small development site to test whether a ‘Guernsey Right to Build’ scheme, proposed recently by Marc Laine, could assist first-time buyers into home ownership.
Deputy Williams’ support for a small-scale pilot project indicates that Housing is open to acceding to a request, made to the committee three weeks ago, to instruct its officials to work up the fine details of the proposed scheme.
But he also warned that it would be ‘bloody difficult’ to make self-build work again, given modern building and financial demands, and that it would ‘would not solve’ the problem of lack of housing supply.
‘It’s certainly well worth looking at as a pilot to see whether it works,’ said Deputy Williams.
‘But I would like everyone to go in with their eyes wide open about how big a challenge it would be.
‘I would try to identify a separate site rather than one within a larger masterplan site because it might hold up other things.
‘There are pros and cons with self-build. It sounds good, but in reality it’s very difficult to do. It’s going to be very challenging.’
He was responding to questions asked at last week’s States meeting by former Housing member John Gollop, who claimed that for too many years there had been ‘official disdain for the old Guernsey values of building your own home’.
Deputy Laine believes that his proposed scheme, revealed by the Guernsey Press earlier this month, would allow custom-build houses to be completed for approximately £200,000 less than current purchase prices on the local market.
It includes solutions to overcome problems with land, finance, planning and construction, which have combined to push the island’s latest housing crisis high up the political agenda and persuaded the States last year to form a new Housing Committee which is now under pressure to accelerate housebuilding.
Deputy Laine has put forward his scheme, which he has been working on for months, as a way of opening home ownership to locals currently squeezed out of the housing market, and he has been trying to secure political, industry and public support to advance the ideas in the States.
He believes it could be started quickly and provide a large number of custom-build homes over the next three years.
They would be largely built off-island using modern methods of construction and require minimal labour to be erected in the island, either on sites owned by the States or the
Deputy Gollop called them ‘exciting new ideas’ and encouraged Housing to look at allocating States-owned land to help them come to fruition.
Various forms of self-build were once common in Guernsey’s housing market, but Deputy Williams warned that times had changed.
‘Frankly, if you’re talking about self-build where people with the skills have got only weekends and evenings to build their homes, remember that standards are way, way higher than 25 or 30 years ago in terms of energy efficiency and air tightness, and so are the financial requirements of releasing money from banks,’ he said.