Gazing out to sea across the marshes, listening to the babble of overwintering geese, Lizzie and Mike Hughes are savouring the last moments of another weekend at their holiday home in Salthouse, north Norfolk, before they begin the hour-long journey back to their six-bed farmhouse near Wymondham, south of Norwich.

The Hughes, both 57, paid more than £400,000 for the three-bed weekender six months ago. “I am so happy with our little plot,” Lizzie says. “It ticks all the right boxes. At home we have to take the car everywhere but here we can walk to the sea, the pub and the post office. We look out over the marshes and open skies and we have Salthouse Heath behind us with views to Blakeney Point.”

Brick and flint coastal villages such as Salthouse are the sort of place that people after a north Norfolk bolt hole want to be in. In Brancaster and Burnham Market, about a third of properties are weekenders or holiday homes. In Blakeney, the figure is 37%. Prices are skyhigh, especially for two- and three-bed fishermen’s cottages.

“I’ve seen terraced cottages in the popular sailing villages like Blakeney sell for up to £300,000,” says Max Sowerby, a partner at local estate agency Sowerbys. “For anything with sea views we tend to go for sealed bids. They can go as much as £100,000 over the top although £25,000 is more usual.”

This is occurring in an area where, says an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) study, 40% of households have an annual income of under £20,000. Richard Ling, manager of the Holt office of William H Brown estate agency, can count on one hand the number of homes he has sold to local first-time buyers in the past six years.

Enough is enough, say locals. They have been making their voices heard ahead of the drafting of new planning rules — the Local Development Frameworks — that will decide the area’s future up to 2021. The proposals go to the Secretary of State for consideration in April. The idea is to create more affordable homes and slow the growth in holiday and retirement properties that fan out from the coast as far as the A148 King’s Lynn-Cromer road 12 miles inland and sometimes beyond. Public consultation ends this month.

“There used to be a limit of, say, £600,000 that people would pay for a second home,” says Andrew Wagstaff, a partner at Bedfords estate agency in Burnham Market. “There is no maximum now and we are selling second homes for well in excess of £1m.”

The AONB covers a five-mile-wide coastal strip from Hunstanton in the west to Mundesley in the east. The long sandy beaches, unspoilt countryside and world-famous wildlife sites fall under the jurisdiction of two planning authorities — King’s Lynn and West Norfolk borough council and North Norfolk district council. The boundary between the two is just west of Holkham.

Both have ageing populations and few affordable homes for local people. They must also protect the countryside.

“It has to stop somewhere,” says councillor Margaret Craske, North Norfolk cabinet member for strategic housing.

“What we are particularly worried about is that there are many large houses with huge gardens that are part of the character of the area, and when people die, relatives tend to sell the plot for a huge amount of money and move.”

To build the 8,000 homes required by 2021, North Norfolk district council intends to focus development on four main towns, Holt, Cromer, Fakenham and North Walsham, and four “secondary” towns, Sheringham, Stalham, Wells-next-the-Sea and Hoveton, where at least 40% of housing in larger schemes would need to be affordable. In 17 “service villages” (with a school, a post office and a shop), which include Blakeney and Weybourne, schemes of two or more homes would have to have 50% affordable housing. Everything else would be designated “countryside”, and building severely restricted.

“In nearly all the small villages, we are saying that no new building will get planning permission unless it is affordable housing based on local needs. That really is a huge change,” says Craske.

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