A recent council meeting shared that housebuilding in Cornwall has fallen for three years running amid soaring construction costs and limited government funding.
With new homes becoming harder to deliver, and fewer affordable options being built, young people in Cornwall face an increasingly difficult task – earning local wages, while competing in a housing market that isn’t producing enough homes.
The Labour MP for Truro and Falmouth, Jayne Kirkham, says the slowdown in construction has made building affordable homes more difficult in recent years.
“Cornwall used to be quite good at building affordable housing, but that’s dropped off. Since COVID and Ukraine, it’s been much harder to get the funding, the supplies, and even the contractors. So it’s been difficult across the board” Kirkham said.
“We’ve put together a housing strategy with a pipeline of projects – a lot of those are stalled schemes. For example, the old council offices site in Truro was supposed to become social and affordable housing, but the council couldn’t afford to deliver it. So we’re working with Homes England on plugging those viability gaps so these homes can actually be built, with at least 30–35% properly affordable.”
New figures show that rising prices, soaring rents, and limited housing supply are locking many out of the property market.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the average house price in Cornwall hit £289,000 in August this year, up nearly 3 percent from last Summer. This was higher than the rise in the whole Southwest region over the same period.
Meanwhile, wages in Cornwall continue to be twenty percent lower than the national average.
But with the recent Autumn Budget pledging to support the building of more homes, mining related jobs in Cornwall may now be able to help more young people get on the housing ladder.
Kirkham said, “The other thing we really need to do is make sure we’ve got the jobs here that pay enough, so that young people can afford housing. I’m coming back to Cornwall for the announcement of the Critical Mineral Strategy – so we’re going to start mining lithium and tin again in Cornwall. Those jobs will be high value jobs, in which people will be payed £40,000 plus to work in. And those are the kind of jobs that we need in Cornwall, so young people can get on the housing ladder as well.”
Deanna, a 21-year-old first time buyer from Camborne, said “a really big hardship along the way was realising that, by myself, I would never be able to get a mortgage. Me and my partner went to the mortgage advisor together, and we asked how much I could borrow myself, and how much we could borrow together – the difference was huge. Together, we could buy a house – but by myself, it was shocking. It’s understandable, but it’s so difficult to accept that, in this day and age, you have to be doing it alongside someone.”