Image © Paul Maguire/Shutterstock
Housing secretary Angela Rayner said councils would be required to place greater weight on the affordability of local housing when calculating how many homes should be built, incorporating an uplift in areas where house prices were “most out of step” with incomes.
Under the changes, councils will be expected to plan for just over 370,000 homes a year, instead of the current 300,000.
“Decisions about what to build should reflect local views, but that should be about how, not whether, to deliver new homes,” she said.
“For the first time, we will make local housing targets mandatory, requiring local authorities to use the same method to work out how many homes to build.
“But that alone is insufficient to meet our ambition, so we are also changing the standard method used to calculate housing need so that it better reflects the urgency of supply for local areas.”
Local authorities would have to review their green belt if that was necessary to meet housing targets, but they would also need to prioritise low-quality grey-belt land, Rayner said.
Where green belt land was developed, new golden rules would require the provision of 50% affordable housing, with a focus on social rent, as well as schools, GP surgeries and transport links.
Stressing the need to maintain the existing affordable housing stock, she said the Government would consult on reform to Right to Buy and announced greater flexibility for councils on their use of receipts under the scheme.
In addition, £450m of the local authority housing fund would flow to councils to provide 2,000 new homes, Rayner said.
The Local Government Association welcomed the Right to Buy consultation and said it would look carefully at proposed changes to planning policy and housing targets.
“While national government can provide useful guidance, it is local councils and communities who know their areas best, so changes to national planning policy should be suitably flexible to allow authorities to make judgement decisions on managing competing demands for uses in their local areas,” said Claire Holland, the association’s housing spokesperson.
She said councils needed the proper levers to support a faster build-out of schemes, including the urgent introduction of a council tax premium for stalled sites and a streamlined compulsory purchase process under which sites on which developers fail to build out to agreed rates can be acquired by local authorities.
Richard Clewer, housing and planning spokesperson for the County Councils Network, welcomed a return to strategic planning but said planning reforms must have an “infrastructure first” approach, given the significant pressure on roads, healthcare and other services faced by many areas.
“It is vital that strategic planning is implemented before councils are required to deliver on any proposed housing targets, because strategic planning will provide the most effective mechanism to outline what infrastructure is necessary to mitigate and enable development, and to propose the right areas for the right homes,” he said.
Cara Pacitti, senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, said the bolstering of mandatory housing targets was a welcome step that would go some way to helping the government meet its homebuilding target.
“However, planning reform alone is unlikely to deliver all the affordable homes we so desperately need in this country, and a significant ramping up of affordable housebuilding is likely to require additional public funding too,” she said.
“The government has said it will bring forward details of future public investment in affordable housing at the next Spending Review.
“The scale of that funding will be key to whether we see a significant increase in the delivery of affordable homes over the coming parliament.”
Meanwhile, research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that while housebuilding over the past 25 years had kept pace with growth in the adult population, England had been “particularly bad” at building homes where they were most needed.
Rising overcrowding in London and the south east in comparison with rising housing stock per person in the northern regions suggested housebuilding had not reflected changes in England’s economic geography, the IFS said.
“Constraints, particularly restrictions on land-use, mean that in England local housing supply does not track changes in local housing demand, even over long periods,” said research economist Elaine Drayton.
“This makes it more difficult for workers to move to areas with growing economic opportunities.”
