This is a government committed to building 1.5m new homes by 2029 and anyone with any knowledge thinks it a challenging target – especially when it isn’t the government that is actually going to be building most of these homes.
So on Tuesday, the last day before Parliament’s summer break, Angela Rayner emerged from seclusion with the big announcement on ‘Building the homes we need‘.
The government has many answers to the question “What changes to planning will most help developers to build housing” and the most important are all to force councils to allocate development land, and grant permissions there when applied for. Hence the decision to reimpose housing targets and make them mandatory, using a new formula the government considers realistic.
Having boldly taken on the Green Belt before the election, Rayner has gone for it and ordered councils to review green belt boundaries and find the poorly performing sites (already developed land, on the edge of settlements, and so on) for release. This is still sensitive enough for the government to insist any ‘grey belt’ site must achieve 50% affordable housing and have appropriate infrastructure.
Any changes to planning policy and targets can take years to be seen but Rayner wants to significantly speed up plan-making and also give Mayors powers to set development strategies which unlock more sites. Some next generation New Towns are also coming as the government’s own contribution – they will be in addition to local targets, not part of meeting them.
On a smaller level, Rayner is going to bring in national rules about delegation of planning decisions, so planning committees only decide “the applications that really matter”, and also don’t have to reassess a site which is allocated for development in the local plan.
Rayner’s reforms aim to make the ‘discretionary’ planning system we have had since the 1948 Act deliver housing consents; it isn’t a move away towards a zoning system as proposed (and then abandoned) by Boris Johnson’s government. In fact on renewable energy there is more discretion as onshore wind schemes up to 100 MW and solar farms up to 150 MW will go for local decision, not to National Infrastructure Planning.
The politics so far have been good for the government, with many newly-elected Labour MPs having signed up to a ‘Labour Growth Group’. There is, as yet, no significant internal opposition in Labour.
What about external opposition? Kemi Badenoch, replying for the Conservatives, seemed to be arguing any major increase in housing delivery was doubtful because the Conservatives had tried the same approach. Robert Jenrick as a leadership candidate is committing to stand for “more homes in our cities”, hoping to channel opposition to greenfield development while accepting there is a housing crisis.
Many Labour politicians are more worried about opposition from other parties on the left, and here the new policy helps. There are no more staunch opponents of building on green belt sites than local Liberal Democrat councillors, and a lot of the green belt now has Lib Dem MPs. A big punch-up over housebuilding will help Labour shore up its vote where it is defending urban seats suffering from housing shortages – and the same goes for the Green Party.
So these changes will happen. But hitting housing targets needs more than just a supportive planning system. To pick the three most crucial, it needs a stable housing market, easy finance for developers, and capacity in the construction industry. Planning policy is easily controlled by governments but a favourable wider economy depends on much more. Are government, developers and the nation’s needs now aligned?
More: