The scheme would mean that nearly all new homes built in the region would only be sold to local residents and key workers, as a solution to the fact that locals are being priced out of the property market.
According to RICS' Oliver Foster, Senior Parliamentary and Policy Officer, "this is certainly an innovative solution to a local issue that is occuring across the country and RICS certainly recognises and sympathises with the problems associated with local workers being priced out of their local housing market. However, this proposal alone is not sustainable and we do not see how it could be translated nationally."
This is for a number of reasons including:
* it appears inherently unfair to those who have to move for any number of reasons into areas outside of what is deemed their locality
* it flies in the face of the principles of a free market
* it could potentially jeopardise the mobilisation of professional services and stagnate local economies that are in need of diversity (social, economic etc)
* it is actually likely to deter developers from building new housing in those designated areas. If their market is restricted to just a small number of local first-time buyers and key workers then they may find the process of selling the new stock becomes slower, hence a slower rate of return of profit
* the bureaucracy involved in determining and defining eligibility would be significant, particularly as central government has already admitted their plans for £60,000 homes are being stalled by their inability to finalise how such properties could be restricted to certain categories of people - i.e. how do you strictly define them and prevent the inevitable loopholes?
* the price of building land is likely to be affected for new homes i.e may fall, making certain landowners more hesitant to sell on to builders/developers
* for owners of these new homes, they may find that price changes do not keep up with the local area/region, if they are restricted to selling to local persons only
However, this ruling would only apply to new housing, which will be a fraction of the overall housing stock. Thus, the overall impact on the short-run is likely to be fairly limited though will grow over time. RICS believes that there needs to be an annual construction target of at least 250,000 dwellings if we are to keep up with the rate of household formation and make some modest inroad into clearing the backlog of housing need.
RICS' recommendations include:
* the encouragement of a return to the provision of accommodation directly by employers
* assembling large-scale areas of brownfield land for housing development
* a more active use by public bodies of compulsory purchase powers
* exploring ways to make better use of the planning skills within authorities, enabling highly qualified and skilled planners to focus more of their time on the more significant planning applications rather than the more minor types, such as house extensions
* ending the anomalous system of VAT in which repair and refurbishment is charged at the full rate, while new build falls under the zero rate
