Are you looking for a home? Last year we asked anyone who was looking for a CLT home to fill in a short Expression of Interest form. That information has been really useful to us in looking for a project, talking with developers and convincing South Cambs District Council to support the CLT as part of the new town development. We are looking to update this information as we get close to setting up our first project.
We continue to make progress following our recent incorporation. We have appeared at the recent Neighbourhood Forums which have been organised by South Cambs District Council. These offer a great opportunity to talk to local people about why we think genuinely affordable homes are important, but also to see Planners, Councillors and Developers and have the opportunity to talk to them about how we can help achieve benefit for the Community.
Waterbeach CLT is now Incorporated! It’s been a productive few months at Waterbeach CLT, and with the new year started we have some exciting news to share. In late January we received confirmation that the CLT has been formally registered and incorporated as a Community Benefit Society with charitable aims. This will allow us to act for the community in perpetuity. This is a big step for the CLT as we are now a formal body, so have a governing set of rules, and when dealing with the Council, developers or potential partners they can see we have community support and are serious about our aims.
We continue to make lots of progress with setting up the Community Land Trust for Waterbeach. We were successful in our grant funding application to SCDC. This means that we now have funds to cover the costs of our formal incorporation. We have been drawing up our model rules and will soon be making our application to become a Community Benefit Society. The housing crisis is still making headlines, with a number of major reports, like the Letwin Review, indicating that something different needs to be done, particularly with the development of larger sites like the one on the Barracks, which is what we are trying to do.
The housing crisis continues to be in the news a lot, and continues to affect our village, with local people being priced out of the market. With affordable housing being the top priority of the newly elected South Cambs District Council, our efforts to set up a Community Land Trust seem to have come at the right time, and community-led alternatives to speculative housebuilding are gaining national interest. It has been a busy couple of months for the Waterbeach CLT.
Parish Council Paper I recently wrote a paper on starting a Community Land Trust for Waterbeach Parish Council. I was asking for their support for my aim of starting a CLT. I explained the difficulty young people have getting a home in the Cambridge area with prices being so high. I also explained the benefits of having a CLT, how it can help with genuinely affordable housing and help the community lead development.
Looking for Volunteers We are looking to form a Community Land Trust and to do that we need to get together a collection of people who are interested in forming a steering group or want a say in how the CLT is run. If you think this is you then please contact us or tell us you are interested when you join the mailing list. Without more interested people this idea won’t get off the ground and it could really benefit the community so please get involved if you are interested or have relevant experience and skills!
The following article was published in the Feb 2018 edition of the Beach News. With house prices being so high in the Cambridge area, owning a home is a challenge for young people in the village. Even with a good job and saving hard it can take a long time to build up a deposit. It is even more difficult if you are renting, indeed market rents themselves can be difficult to afford.
I met with the Neighbourhood Plan group today to propose the idea of setting up a Community Land Trust for Waterbeach. One of the emerging Objectives of the Neighbourhood Plan is access to truly affordable housing for local people. Work carried out by Cambridge ACRE on behalf of the group has already found that there are more than 100 people with a connection to Waterbeach on the affordable housing register, and there are likely many more who aren’t officially on the list.
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