NEWS
Cornwall Rural Affordable Housing Forum hosts webinar focusing on early steps for supporting housing projects.
CRCC deliver Cornwall’s Rural Housing Enabler programme in partnership with Cornwall Council’s Affordable Housing team and Three Seas Cornwall.
As part of the programme, we are delivering the Cornwall Rural Affordable Housing Forum. This is a new space for collaboration, learning, and action around rural housing delivery. Bringing together parish councillors, community groups, housing associations, landowners, and local support organisations.
The Forum is open to anyone and aims to connect people working to provide affordable homes in Cornwall’s rural and coastal communities.
Through quarterly meetings and workshops, three online and one in person, the Forum offers the opportunity to share experience, explore challenges, and highlight examples of good practice.
Each session features expert speakers and open discussion, creating a supportive environment where ideas can grow into real projects.
Rural affordable housing faces unique barriers: land availability, planning constraints, infrastructure costs, and community engagement. The Forum provides a space to tackle these issues collectively, helping stakeholders to build knowledge, partnerships, and confidence.
Following the success of our first online webinar, which had over 50 attendees, we held our second online event on 29th July.
In this webinar, we looked at some considerations during the first steps in supporting a rural affordable housing project, including:
Finding a site
Exploring what makes a proposed site ‘viable’?
Different models a parish council or community group can use to organise themselves and with other organisations to progress a proposed site
Different funding options communities can unlock to begin the early-stage feasibility work to progress a site to pre-app
For more information head to our Rural Housing webpage.
The Rural Housing Enabling programme is a national scheme funded by DEFRA and delivered through the Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE) network. It aims to boost the supply of affordable housing in rural areas. This programme funds Rural Housing Enablers (RHEs) to work with communities to identify housing needs, secure funding, and navigate the development process for affordable housing schemes.