Rural Housing Week: putting communities at the heart of rural housing investment
As Rural Housing Week (6 – 10 July) shines a spotlight on the importance of affordable homes in the countryside, we explore how community land trusts (CLTs) can help ensure housing investment delivers the greatest long-term benefit for local people.
Rural communities face a unique set of housing challenges. In many areas, rising house prices and limited affordability make it difficult for local people to remain in the places they grew up. At the same time, housing providers face increasingly difficult decisions about where investment can have the greatest impact, particularly when some older homes can be costly to maintain and upgrade.
Against this backdrop, Rural Housing Week provides an opportunity to consider not just how many homes are needed, but how investment can create lasting value for the communities it is intended to serve. CLTs are one way of achieving this, giving local people a greater say in how housing is planned and delivered.
Delivering housing with communities, not just for them
CLTs are non-profit organisations owned and run by local people. They help communities play an active role in shaping affordable homes and ensure development responds to genuine local need.
This approach can be especially valuable in rural areas, where successful development often depends on building trust, securing local support and creating outcomes that benefit the wider community.
As Tom Chance, Chief Executive of the CLT Network, said at our recent Housing Innovation Forum: "CLTs can move faster and build smarter because the community is already on board."
A model that works
One example is Chagford in Devon, where Chagford CLT was established to help address a shortage of affordable homes for local people.
Working alongside Chagford CLT, CG Fry & Son, Chagford Parish Council, West Devon Borough Council and Dartmoor National Park, we helped deliver 28 affordable homes, including 22 for affordable rent and six for shared ownership. The wider 93-home development also delivered a new fire station, public car park and business units, creating benefits that extended beyond housing alone.
The scheme demonstrates how community involvement from the earliest stages can help ensure development reflects local aspirations while supporting the long-term sustainability of rural communities.
Chagford is not an isolated example. In March alone, we broke ground on five new CLT schemes across Dorset and Devon, adding 102 homes to our CLT pipeline and marking our busiest ever month for CLT starts. By 2028, we expect to deliver at least 189 new CLT homes, more than doubling the amount of community-led housing in our portfolio.
Combined with the 150 CLT homes already delivered, this will mean partnering with local communities to create more than 330 permanently affordable homes through the CLT model. This growing programme demonstrates our long-term commitment to supporting communities to shape and deliver the homes they need, reinforcing our position as a leading housing association partner for community land trusts.
Learning from what works
The case for community-led housing is also gaining traction beyond the housing sector itself. The Fabian Society's recent report, Quick Wins: Building More Homes in the Communities that Need Them, identified CLTs as an effective mechanism for delivering affordable homes and increasing local support for development. The report argues that community-led approaches can help unlock housing delivery by giving local people a greater stake in shaping their communities, adding to a growing body of evidence that development is most successful when communities are actively involved in the process.
This was a key theme at our recent Housing Innovation Forum, which brought together housing leaders, policymakers and community housing experts to explore how CLTs can play a greater role in meeting housing need.
Alongside Tom Chance, the panel included Lizzi Collinge MP, Alistair Smyth from the National Housing Federation and Steve Watson from Middlemarch Community Led Housing CIC, joining our Chief Executive Bjorn Howard and Chief Investment Officer Amanda Williams. Discussions focused on how successful community-led approaches can be scaled up and embedded more widely across housing delivery.
The discussion came against a backdrop of growing momentum for community-led housing. In March, we started work on more than 100 CLT homes in a single month, demonstrating the potential for housing associations and communities to work together to deliver locally supported affordable housing at scale.
Lizzi Collinge MP highlighted the importance of meaningful community engagement: "Done well, community involvement is a fantastic enabler of housing development. CLTs empower people to help shape and support new homes. What I've seen is that very early-stage engagement really helps, especially if you're showing that you understand people's real housing needs."
One of the key recommendations emerging from the discussion was that every new town should deliver at least 100 homes through a CLT established by the existing local community. Our modelling suggests that as much as 10% of the government's New Towns Programme could be delivered through this approach.
While that recommendation focuses on new towns, the underlying principle is equally relevant to rural communities: housing investment is most effective when local people have a meaningful role in shaping it.
The impact on local people
For people living in CLT homes, the benefits go beyond affordability.
Rebecca Potter, who lives in the first Section 106 CLT development in Chagford, says: "Being able to live in an affordable home in Chagford is just great. It means that I'm not struggling financially every month wondering how I'm going to pay my rent. I'm not having to rely on benefits because my rent is affordable with the work that I do. It means that I can stay close to my family and friends, I can work locally, I can still be a part of the community and just gain security in my life and what I want to do."
Looking beyond the numbers
As we mark Rural Housing Week, it is important to recognise that successful housing investment is about more than increasing supply. It is about creating homes that meet local needs, support rural economies and strengthen communities for the long term.
CLTs are increasingly being recognised as part of the solution. Alongside successful schemes such as Chagford and the recommendations that emerged from our Housing Innovation Forum, the Fabian Society's Quick Wins: Building More Homes in the Communities that Need Them report highlights the role community-led housing can play in delivering affordable homes and building local support for development. Meanwhile, research from the CLT Network suggests communities could support the delivery of hundreds of thousands of homes through scalable community-led models.
That growing body of evidence points to a simple conclusion: when communities have a genuine role in shaping development, housing is more likely to meet localneeds anddeliver lasting social value.
Whether in rural villages, market towns or the UK's future new towns, community land trusts offer a practical way to align housing delivery with local priorities. As Rural Housing Week highlights the importance of affordable homes to thriving countryside communities, the growing evidence in support of CLTs suggests community-led housing should be a bigger part of the conversation.
Find out more about how we're working with local communities to deliver affordable homes through the CLT model: https://www.aster.co.uk/about-us/housebuilding/clt
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