AN INNOVATIVE scheme to provide low-cost housing has enabled people to stay in their village.
Private estate owners were given permission to build houses in Burwardsley providing some of them were rented at affordable prices. The profits from the rest, rented at full market price, subsidise the low-cost housing.
The scheme was the first of its kind when it was agreed in April 2003 following negotiations between Bolesworth Estate Company, based in Tattenhall, and Chester City Council.
Three of the seven houses in Burwardsley Court, built on a brownfield site, are rented to people who would not otherwise have been able to afford to re-main in the village.
Jayne Dutton, 31, moved into one of the two-bedroomed houses last month with her boyfriend Andrew Edwards, from Tatten-hall.
She said: 'I have lived in Burwardsley for most of my life and I have wanted to stay in Burwardsley because that's where I have grown up and because my family are there. But house prices were £300,000-£350,000-plus.'
Miss Dutton, a finance manager for a company in Cholmondeley, said: 'I'm not on a low wage but, even so, I couldn't afford a mortgage for these types of prices. So it was forcing us out of the area, towards Chester.'
The couple pay a typical council rate of £75 per week.
The affordable properties are allocated by a committee made up of two representatives from Burwardsley Parish Council, two Tattenhall members of Chester City Council and two representatives from owner Bolesworth Estate, and is monitored by the city council.
A city council spokesman said: 'The profits from the market housing are used to help pay for the affordable housing. This was unique in Chester district at the time, and pretty rare generally when applied to rural areas.
'The Section 106 agreement allows the council to monitor rents to ensure they remain affordable - ie equal to rents offered by housing associations - and also restricts occupancy to residents in housing need in Burwardsley first, adjoining parishes second and the rural area of Chester third.'
Anthony Barbour, managing director of Bolesworth Estate Company, said: 'We felt that Burwardsley needed some new building because over the last 50 years it actually lost a lot of houses, so the population was smaller than it used to be and all the services in the village do depend on numbers.
'As we are the dominant homeowner of property in the village, it was desirable that we should try to do something about it.
'The other houses we built paid for the three that aren't profitable. We would not otherwise have got planning permission for those other houses had we not built the affordable housing.'
Mr Barbour added that there was a 'very great need' for affordable housing in the area.
He said: 'Tattenhall is not too bad because it has had other affordable housing schemes so Tattenhall has had its allocation of low-cost housing, but generally speaking in the smaller villages there is a very great need because council houses have mostly been sold and over the market prices for property are so high that people can't afford to buy.'
The city council spokesman said talks were 'ongoing' about similar schemes in other parts of the rural district.
'However, we can't really say any more at this stage because discussions are still taking place,' he said.
