As a charity Cornwall CLT is non-Party political. However, we continue our series of sharing relevant manifestos and Campaigns from within the CLH sector.

CLT Network: Community Land Trusts Manifesto 2024

The CLT Network has published it’s 2024 Community Land Trusts Manifesto with policies that would enable community led developments to account for at least 5% of housing development in the UK by 2029. According to the CLT Network, this would enable the completion of 15,000 new homes a year and would generate over £1 billion of community wealth.

The manifesto sets out 10 policies that would address common barriers to community development, ownership, and agency for CLTs that are creating and managing community homes and assets, sustainable energy projects or stewarding land for biodiversity.

The policy asks in summary:

Housing, Regeneration and High Streets

1. Community Led Development Sites, to give Local and Neighbourhood Plans the ability to allocate sites and parcels of large sites for community development.

2. Large site stewardship, to require that community assets are owned and stewarded by a democratic and accountable body and promote opportunities for CLTs to commission and codesign more of these assets with councils, developers and housing associations.

3. Community led regeneration, to enable residents to form a CLT to have greater agency in the redevelopment of social housing estates and other important assets in partnership with councils, housing associations and developers, including reviving the regulations for the Right to Transfer.

4. Affordable housing pre-development finance, to provide for enablers of community led development to agree strategic grants with Homes England, the Welsh Government and the GLA to draw down finance for pre-development work, working with communities to acquire sites and gain planning permission for community approved designs, and bring these de-risked projects to partner developers and housing associations.

5. Leasehold and commonhold, to replace leasehold with commonhold as the default arrangement but maintain exemptions for CLTs, and ensure reforms protect the CLT governance model.

A Community Ownership Strategy

6. A community ownership fund, to enable the purchase of any asset that the community deems of social, economic or environmental value and with a funding stream to develop new sector-based intermediaries.

7. A community Growth Lab, to provide a £150m endowment to support the development of the ‘missing market’ of delivery and finance intermediaries to support community ownership at scale.

8. A Community Right to Buy, a right of first refusal to buy assets of community value and public assets for sale at an independently valued price.

Rethinking Land, Nature Restoration and Farming

9. Review policies and funding for nature restoration and farming, to incentivise support for community ownership of nature and farming projects.

10. Establishing Land Commissions, to reform land markets, embed social purpose in land ownership, and promote greater community ownership of land

Read the full 2024 CLTN manifesto from: CLT Network Manifesto HERE >>