The housing crisis is forcing key workers out of Yorkshire’s towns and cities – Nick Atkin

The numbers speak for themselves but when you dig a little bit deeper the alarm bells really start ringing. In York for example, rents are rising at a faster rate than they are in London, and you now need more than ten times the average earnings to buy the average home in the city. In the wider York and North Yorkshire area it could take more than three years to clear the social housing waiting list – and that’s assuming the list doesn’t continue to grow by more people applying – which isn’t going to happen.

I’m pretty sure that most people reading this will know someone who is either struggling to get onto the property ladder or whose mortgage payments have increased. Some of you, me included, will have children who are paying record private rents and simply can’t afford to save up a deposit for their own home.

It’s not just those people on the lowest incomes who are the only ones who need affordable housing. We’re seeing the chronic shortage of affordable homes having a real impact in our schools, hospitals and care homes. Soaring property prices and private rents are making it harder to recruit and retain teachers, nurses and care workers. Often the people working in education, health, emergency and community services are on low or moderate incomes. It’s simply too expensive to live close to the communities they serve, making our towns and cities unequal.

It's a challenge that has been brought into sharp focus in research by the York and North Yorkshire Housing Partnership. Their analysis was carried out using affordability calculations from the UK’s biggest building society, Nationwide, and looked at the maximum mortgage that could be raised with a 10 per cent deposit. 

It found that a newly qualified teacher earning £30,000 a year would fall more than £100,000 short of being able to afford to buy an average-priced home in Yorkshire which currently stands at £235,436. And in the region’s most expensive area of Harrogate and Knaresborough, where the average home costs almost £420,000, they would need to find another £285,000 before they could afford to buy the average priced home.

The situation is worse for care workers and trainee police officers whose annual salaries are much lower. People in these roles are often left with no other option but to continue to live with their parents, pay sky-high private rents or live in an overcrowded home, making it almost impossible to save up a deposit to buy their own homes.

Housing stress, insecurity and long-distance commuting significantly adds to the stress and fatigue key workers already face. That, in turn, has implications for the long-term retention of experienced workers which can culminate in larger class sizes in our schools, longer wait times at our hospitals and fewer nurses in our care homes.

Many key workers need to live relatively close to where they work, and this is critically important for the functioning of these essential public services. It’s exactly why we urgently need to improve how we plan for and address the housing crisis.

The solution sounds simple. We need to build thousands more affordable homes in the right places. The region’s housing associations already provide 9 per cent of all homes across Yorkshire, employing more than 13,000 people and generating £677m for the regional economy every year. They are ready, willing and committed to building the affordable homes that Yorkshire so desperately needs.

But they can’t do it on their own. Whichever political party wins the election on July 4 must commit to a long-term plan for housing and move away from short-term thinking. We need a clear plan that removes funding barriers, speeds up the planning process and provides grant funding that keeps pace with costs to deliver the homes the region needs.

We also need to take a more strategic approach to building the homes Yorkshire needs. That means the right homes, in the right places, building homes for large families, single parents and young professionals, including our key workers and across a mixture of different tenure types.

For the sake of our schools, hospitals, care homes and other essential services, addressing the region’s housing emergency must be a key consideration for voters when they’re at the ballot box on July 4.

Nick Atkin is chief executive of Yorkshire Housing.