Local housing charity welcomes new Cornwall Community Land Trust residents

Social landlord Coastline Housing has taken on seven extra homes across two small Cornish villages thanks to a new agreement with Cornwall Community Land Trust.

The agreement is part of a wider strategy to help give Cornwall Community Land Trust more capacity to unlock further delivery of affordable homes for local people in future.

Six of the properties are located in Ruan Minor on The Lizard, with one additional home in Blunts near Saltash.

These homes previously had tenancy and repair services provided by a landlord in Devon and the geographical distance involved was creating issues for customers. Coastline was approached to help by purchasing and managing these properties and the landlord was delighted to assist.

Stuart Blackie, Head of Housing Services at Coastline, said: “We are really pleased to welcome these new residents to the Coastline family. Given that we only operate in Cornwall we were in a great position to help improve things for these customers. We have been busy getting to know our new customers and bringing them on board with new tenancy agreements, welcome packs and more.”

Cornwall Community Land Trust will use the proceeds from the sale of these homes to refocus energy on bringing forward more affordable home schemes within the county for the benefit of local people.

Dominic Fairman, Chair of Cornwall Community Land Trust, said: “Cornwall Community Land Trust are delighted to find a new long-term sustainable landlord for our tenants in Ruan Minor and Saltash. The governance for being a landlord for social housing is quite rightly very tightly regulated, and as a small charity we were unavoidably relying on third party contracts to manage this which was unsatisfactory for both us and the tenants.

“The fact that Coastline are a Cornwall-only organisation who very much share our outlook and values mean that they are the perfect people to take on the long-term responsibility for these houses and keep them in perpetuity for the benefit of their local communities.”

Coastline Housing has recently launched its new Coastline Plan for 2025-2030, setting out ambitions to build 300 to 350 new affordable homes each year in its ongoing mission to work towards solving the housing crisis in Cornwall.

Nathan Mallows, Director of Finance, People and Change, added: “While we have some really large developments coming out of the ground across Cornwall at present, we are also committed to working with small, rural communities across the county to meet affordable housing needs in all parts of Cornwall. Working with others is an important part of our mission to help solve the Cornish housing crisis so using our management skill and balance sheet capacity to help give the Cornwall Community Land Trust the capability to bring forward more viable affordable housing schemes is really a win-win situation.”