Use national parks for more affordable housing

Carl Lis has said that more affordable housing should be built in England’s national parks to help communities excluded by spiralling prices driven by second homes.

Lis, the new chair of National Parks England, spoke to the Guardian and warned that young people and national parks staff are being forced out of some of the most scenic parts of the country by high prices, driven in part by exclusive holiday homes.

Hamptons International reports that house prices in some English national parks are more than double the regional average. For example, the average house price in the New Forest is £622,670 in the past year, often pricing out young families and the park workers.

Lis, who is also chair of the Yorkshire Dales authority, claimed that the government should also take action on ‘land banking’ by developers in protected areas such as the Lake District, the South Downs and the Peak District, so-called because property speculators hoard plots with planning permission for years to maximise profits.

To help achieve this, he said that more should be done to attract people from a range of backgrounds to England’s most beautiful areas after a government-commissioned report warned visitors to parks are ‘exclusive, mainly white, mainly middle‑class club’.