15 February 2008
Local authorities will ignore centrally imposed house-building targets unless they have financial incentives to approve developers' plans, according to a senior government adviser.
Steve Nickell, who chairs the government's National Housing and Planning Advice Unit, this week accused ministers of imposing 'Stalinist' planning guidance on councils instead of giving them powers to raise money.
While he welcomed the proposed community infrastructure levy, Nickell said that it was being introduced too late. He also said that section 106 agreements, under which developers build affordable housing in return for planning permission, should be scrapped.
Gordon Brown pledged within days of becoming prime minister that 3 million new homes would be built in England by 2020. But Nickell, a professor in economics at Oxford University, said house building would not have slowed down so much if a straightforward system for charging developers had been in place sooner.
'Unless you give local authorities some sort of financial incentive to support house building, they are going to be against it,' he told Public Finance. 'The easiest way is to have a tariff per square foot, which may vary between greenfield and brownfield sites.'
Nickell, whose unit was set up in 2006 to advise the Department for Communities and Local Government, was speaking as opposition mounted across rural England to the government's plan for ten eco-towns.
The DCLG is considering 57 expressions of interest, mostly submitted by private developers, and should announce a short list of sites this month. Some councils and residents claim these are little more than earlier bids dressed up as eco-schemes.
Schemes meeting opposition include Co-operative Estates' plan to build 15,000 homes near Leicester. David Parsons, leader of Leicestershire County Council, said: 'Major developers are trying to cash in on the eco-town bandwagon in areas where they've been denied permission before.'
To qualify as an eco-town, developments must include between 5,000 and 20,000 zero-carbon homes, have good transport links and use other technology to save energy.
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