A new community land trust has been set up for the town, looking to ensure there are affordable homes on the Vearse Farm development.

Bridport Area Community Housing has been registered as a community land trust, using the Wessex Community Assets standards system.

Community land trusts deliver homes to people in the area or with a connection to the area and remain as social housing in perpetuity with the homes not able to be sold on the open market. Although the community land trust doesn't necessarily manage the properties, it owns the land and will often give it to a local housing provider to manage on its behalf.

This will be the third community land trust in the town, joining Bridport Co-housing, which is currently developing a site by the hospital, and Symene Community Land Trust which was responsible for the homes by the medical centre.

This one is hoped to provide around 50 homes within the development of more than 750 homes on the edge of Bridport.

Phyllida Culpin, of Bridport Area Community Housing, said: "Bridport Co-housing has a very specific remit and Symene was never envisaged to be a particularly large land trust.

"Within the Vearse Farm planning application, in the Section 106 [obligations agreed between the local authority and developer within the planning permission] it allows up to 50 of the affordable housing units to be made available to a community land trust, but there's a very small period of time in the development period that the land trust can take those properties, there's no point waiting until they are on site.

"The key bit is that we do it now so we are ready to start talking to Hallam Land [Vearse Farm development applicants] or whichever part of the development is sold off and becomes the bit the community land trust might want to work with."

Phyllida said that members of the Symene Community Land Trust are part of Bridport Area Community Housing steering group and that the various land trusts could join together and possibly manage the properties themselves.

She also said that the community land trust group is "more ambitious than Vearse Farm".

She added: "Vearse Farm will still be some time away - if indeed it all happens - before those homes are available, so what we also want to look at is if buildings become redundant. If they become available, can we get in there and look to convert the property or office block into affordable housing. Perhaps a community land trust can run shops, it can run community assets as well.

"It's pretty ambitious, but it's very early days."

Look out for more news and updates on Bridport Area Community Housing in the new year.