Latest news with #Shiers
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Wales least affordable part of Britain for first-time buyers
Wales is the most difficult part of Great Britain for first-time buyers to get onto the property ladder, according to new data. A home affordability index report published by Skipton Group building society found six out of the 10 least affordable areas of Britain were in Wales. The index considers a range of factors including house prices in local areas as well as the average income of potential first-time buyers. The Welsh government said it understood the difficulties facing first-time buyers and had extended the Help to Buy Wales scheme. House prices plunge as council acts on second homes 'I was homeless while revising for my GCSEs' Where are Welsh homes most and least affordable? Ceredigion and Powys were found to be the least affordable areas of Wales for first-time buyers. Average house prices in Ceredigion were £236,000, higher than the Wales average. That is despite the county having "the seventh lowest median income in Great Britain" and means less than 3% of potential first-time buyers living in the area can afford to buy, according to the report. Owen Shiers, 40, a freelance musician who lives in a social housing co-operative near Eglwys-fach, Ceredigion, said he had "given up" on owning his own home. Mr Shiers pays rent and, with the other tenants, is responsible for managing and maintaining the house. He said he was not surprised that Ceredigion came bottom of the affordability league. "I think people forget that Ceredigion is one of the poorest areas of northern Europe," said Mr Shiers. "There's gross inequality between the people who maybe have grown up here and who are part of the economic system in Ceredigion, and the people who often come from the big cities who have a lot of money." Mr Shiers said he had thought about buying a house but "it seems so insurmountable to me, given my own economic situation. "I have worried about it, but I've kind of given up. It just seems impossible." He said he was worried about the impact on Ceredigion. "I see it having a far wider effect on the Welsh language and Welsh culture and the ability of young people to stay in the places where they've grown up. "My sister couldn't afford to buy a house in the village where we grew up. She's got a young family and had to move quite far away. "We often only find out how bad that has been when it's too late. It's a bit like watching a car crash in slow motion. You feel powerless to stop it." Ceredigion - 2.7% of first-time buyers can afford to buy Powys - 2.7% of first-time buyers can afford to buy Pembrokeshire - 2.9% of first-time buyers can afford to buy Cardiff - 3% of first-time buyers can afford to buy Vale of Glamorgan - 3.1% of first-time buyers can afford to buy Monmouthshire - 3.3% of first-time buyers can afford to buy Source: Skipton Group Home Affordability Index Report Stuart Haire, Skipton Group's chief executive, said people "might expect London and the south-east to dominate the least affordable areas for first-time buyers, so it's shocking to see Wales feature so heavily". "The first step onto the property ladder remains by far the hardest, but for Welsh first-time buyers, it must feel impossible. "Our new data shows just how stark their affordability challenge is." Tania Dutnell, an estate agent in Ceredigion, said another issue affecting first-time buyers in the county was the type of properties for sale. There are "a lot of large properties…we don't have many small (houses) or lots of terraced houses. There's lots of different properties on the higher end of the stock market", said Ms Dutnell. She also said that interest rate rises in recent years had made things more difficult. "For the first time buyers, you've got options of staying with parents, and the bank of mum and dad to help to get deposits together. "Or you are in rented accommodation [which] is very expensive, and all the money that you earn tends to go onto that, so it's very hard to save." Ceredigion council said its planning department had a target of 20% of all houses to be affordable across the county. It said that target has been exceeded, with 37% of permitted houses and 33% of all houses built since the adoption of the Local Development Plan being affordable. A council spokesperson added: "The council has also introduced a Community Housing Scheme, an equity sharing product, to support people to get on the housing ladder." The Welsh government said it understood the difficulties facing first-time buyers. A spokesperson said: "In December, we launched the extension of our Help to Buy Wales scheme which has helped more than 14,500 people who could not afford to buy a home. "Our Self Build Wales scheme also creates opportunities for people to build homes through loan funding for land and development costs." 'We gave our two houses to the homeless' Floods, ceiling holes and loose sockets - life in a new-build
The Guardian
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jude Rogers's folk album of the month
In the tiny kiln rooms of west Walian mills over a century ago, farmers would tell stories, read verse and sing songs through the night as their oats baked around them. This gathering was a shimli, a Welsh word that falls from the tongue with a similar softness to Carmarthenshire folk singer Owen Shiers's delivery of these 11 quietly political songs. Recording as Cynefin (a Welsh word for a place where we feel we belong), Shiers's second album mixes traditional ballads, musical settings of poems and originals built on stories collected from rural west Walians, all sung in Welsh. Their arrangements are pastoral and lyrical, weaving in horns, double bass, piano and strings in a way that tilts towards Robert Kirby's work with Nick Drake, while also sounding strangely sun-kissed and filmic (imagine Wales by way of a short hop to Iberia). In 19th-century fishing ballad Pysgota/Fishing, Shiers's guitar arpeggios echo the ripples of the river Teifi: once, but no longer, a thriving waterway. May carol Mae'r Nen Yn Ei Glesni (The Heavens Are Greening) is warmed into life by the Machynlleth Wind Band, while a spaghetti western flourish fills Shiers's whistling on Cornicyll (Lapwing). The voices of Shiers's interviewees also open Shili Ga Bwd (Wormwood) and Pont Llanio (a song about a factory that was a thriving community hub now long closed and choked with weeds), recalling King Creosote and Jon Hopkins' moving experiments on 2010's Mercury-nominated Diamond Mine. In his bilingual liner notes, Shiers calls this album 'a stake in the ground for the diverse and the disappearing in our age of homogenisation and mass amnesia', although he foregoes anger in his sound for a gentler sense of contemplation. His voice, plain and unadorned, also veers the album away from easy nostalgia but still offers a cosseting tone of communion. Gavin Fairhall Lever are composer/fiddler James Patrick Gavin, double-bassist Tim Fairhall and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Lever, and Tearing Down Walls (self-released) is an exhilarating mashing together of Celtic and eastern European traditional music and jazz harmony. Especially thrilling are Set Sail, opened up by the cacophonous gnashing of Gavin's fiddle strings and the shimmering soundworld of Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Jacken Elswyth and poet CA Conrad's collaborative release, A Cast of Flowers (Lanterne Records), is an energising listen, featuring seven beautiful improvisations by Elswyth in response to Conrad's experimental verse (which accompanies it in a beautiful mini-zine). Surprising experiments come, too, in In the Bath, an anthology stacked with folk musicians (and others) covering pop songs. Marry Waterson makes the Spice Girls' Say You'll Be There sound like a Kirsty MacColl original, while Angeline Morrison and her zither nail PJ Harvey's The Dancer.
