Labour Housing Policy

Mission accomplished? Labour claims planning reform victory, but will local communities be convinced?

The Government wasted no time in launching its mission to ‘get Britain building again’, announcing a raft of policies to boost housing and infrastructure in its first 100 days. Chelgate Local’s Michael Hardware assesses the fast-moving policy landscape that developers and local authorities now face.

As Sir Keir Starmer addressed a jubilant Labour party conference in Liverpool last month, one of the loudest cheers erupted when he outlined his new government’s achievements in office.

“Planning – reformed. Doctors – back in theatre…. the onshore ban – lifted.”

While the de facto ‘ban’ on onshore windfarms has indeed been lifted, those of us who have watched successive governments attempt to speed up England’s planning system may have raised a sceptical eyebrow at the first of these claims. Has planning really been reformed? Already?

The government’s first 100 days have certainly seen a blizzard of activity, designed to deliver 1.5m additional homes over the course of this parliament, a near 50% increase on that achieved by the previous government.

The return of mandatory housing targets

The first, most significant, and perhaps most contentious reform is the proposed reintroduction of mandatory housing targets for local planning authorities, to be achieved through changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Once approved, England’s councils will have to find space for around 370,000 new homes each year, instead of the current 305,000. A 35% ‘uplift’ for the biggest urban areas will be ditched – London, for example, will see its annual quota fall from 99,000 to 80,000 homes – while targets for England’s least affordable boroughs will increase.

If local authorities can’t meet their housing targets, they will need to look to previously developed land in the greenbelt, and then to their ‘grey belt’ – greenbelt land of low ecological value on the edge of existing settlements. Such developments must include 50% affordable housing, enhance the local environment, and have necessary local services already in place – a tall order you might think, given that most local services are already oversubscribed.

Local planning authorities who have a draft local plan that falls short of these mandatory targets must now start their local plan process again, unless they have reached the final (regulation 19) stage of public consultation.

To complicate matters further and add more pressure on the supply of development land, the proposed NPPF reforms will also require councils to identify sites to build laboratories, digital infrastructure, and gigafactories to “meet the needs of a modern economy”.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Further legislative changes were proposed in the King’s Speech. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill includes a simplified consent process for significant infrastructure schemes; moves to modernise planning committees to make them more efficient at processing applications; and reform of compulsory purchase compensation to enable local authorities to assemble sites at a “fair but not excessive” price, alongside other measures to ease land assembly. The bill also outlines the government’s intent to require developers to fund nature recovery initiatives, presumably in addition to rules on biodiversity net gain.

A new generation of new towns

Later in July the government announced that it had appointed Sir Michael Lyons to lead an independent ‘New Towns Taskforce’ supported by Deputy Chair Dame Kate Barker. The taskforce was given 12 months to consult with local communities and set out recommendations as to how, and where, new communities of at least 10,000 homes should be built.

New Homes Accelerator

Turning its attention to developments that already have planning permission, the government has announced the creation of a New Homes Accelerator, a collaboration between the government, Homes England, local authorities, and developers to accelerate the delivery of developments that are “not progressing as quickly as they could be”. The government believes there may be more than 200 such sites with outline or detailed planning permission, with the potential to deliver up to 300,000 homes. Whether the government intends to use carrots, sticks, or a mixture of the two to expedite delivery is not clear.

Planning: reformed?

Does this policy blitz put the government on track to deliver levels of housebuilding unseen in England since the 1960s?

Elsewhere in Sir Keir’s conference speech came a clue as to where the government’s aspirations may come unstuck. Arguing that politicians needed to level with the country on the tradeoffs that growth would bring, he said: “If we want justice to be served, some communities must live close to new prisons… if we want cheaper electricity, we need new pylons overground.”

He might have added that if England is to build 300,000 homes a year, then local communities’ myriad concerns about new development – congested roads, oversubscribed local services, downward pressure on house prices, the loss of green fields and natural habitats, and so on – must be addressed.

It was a vociferous outcry against ‘top-down housing targets’ that helped birth ‘Localism’ and usher David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition into Downing Street in 2010, putting an end to Labour’s last spell in office. Having reintroduced mandatory housing targets, Sir Keir may find that the battle to ‘reform planning’ has only just begun.