Writing in Conservative Home, Conservative MP for North Devon, Selaine Saxbyn outlines her mission has always been to level up the pockets of deprivation in her ‘remote, rural and coastal’ constituency

Saxbyn highlights that levelling up for her has been trying to bring high speed broadband to digitally excluded areas as well as sorting out the housing crisis caused by second homes and holiday lets.

House prices have inflated significantly in the local area meaning that local families are unable to afford properties in an unbalanced market.

Ms Saxbyn criticises the right to buy scheme for exacerbating the crisis, and has said we need to ‘find new ways of providing affordable homes for rural people, such as allowing farms to redevelop outbuildings into homes for their own workers, and enabling villages to build homes for their own families’.

The lack of affordable housing has further effects on rural communities, including pushing young people into relocating whilst at the same time becoming home to more retirement and holiday communities, which it doesn’t have the population or infrastructure to support.

Full article:

Conservative Home - Selaine Saxby: To end the rural housing crisis, we must stop treating the countryside like a holiday park