RE: Affordable Housing: Market Discount-linked to incomes - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

South Lakeland use a dscount linked to incomes - https://www.southlakeland.gov.uk/housing/affordable-housing/affordable-housing-building/ 

We also use discounted sale as a model to deliver affordable housing here at Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority - see our Housing Guidance - https://www.lochlomond-trossachs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/SG-Housing-2017-adopted-1.pdf

We have approved very few homes under this policy. We use a Section 75 agreement to secure as a permanet home and then apply the discount.  We get the house valued by the district valuer first to get an idea of what the open market value is, then apply different discount levels between 20-40% and then look at the income levels in the area to work out the discount but it is not a science, but a judgement. Design is important to achieve this and you will see in the guidance our guide to how to designing an affordable home - restricted size etc.

We have investigated the idea of using an elgibility criteria for the house but have steered away from this as the burden itself will not attract those that can afford an open market house (in our view). So it tends to be someone who cannot afford a house on the open market that wants to own it - it is self-policing in this way rather than us as a planning authority checking eligibility as we are not a housing authority.

It is tricky though as income in the area is low and we have figures of 75% cannot afford the average house price, 43% cannot afford the LQ house price and 37% cannot afford PRS housing, and even 14% cannot afford RSL housing. We therefore attempt to get the price as near to the LQ house price rather than it being affordable to those on the lowest incomes.

Hope this helps. I'd be interested in your research findings.  I had also looked at Cornwall when developing our policy.

Kirsty

Stockport Council do for the shared ownership property. The SPG is from 2003 but the method for calculating is still current. There's also an explanatory note produced for developers. Both are linked at the page below:
Affordable housing - Stockport Council 
It's slightly complicated in one sense, but for the end user, there are four maximum shared ownership prices based on dwelling size. The prices are based on the average of the most recent 3 years of ASHE income data, with a 'x3.5' mortgage calculater and 5% deposit factored in. 

This is not an answer to the question, but taking the opportunity to have a minor rant, I think it's about time the government stopped basing so many of its defintions of 'affordable' as 'up to 80%' of whatever market value is. For starters, 'up to 80%' means '80%', so lets not kid ourselves on that. And of course the more market values increase, the more affordable prices increase. That would probably be fine if everything else kept pace with values, but we all know it's not doing, so all that happens is that the products become more unaffordable over time. The only way to best ensure products are genuinely affordable is by reference to income. More needs to be done by government to encourage LAs to do that.