An overhaul of the planning system to accelerate housebuilding and deliver 1.5 million homes over this Parliament has been announced.
Under the plans, councils will be told they must play their part to meet housing need by reaching a new ambitious combined target of 370,000 homes a year. This comes less than one week after the Prime Minister announced the Plan for Change that sets our milestone of delivering 1.5 million new homes over five years.
In a major boost for communities across the country, the government is today turbocharging growth with new, mandatory targets for councils to ramp up housebuilding across the country. The planning overhaul is set to tackle the chronic housing crisis once and for all and will mean hard graft at work will be rewarded with security at home.
The changes tackle the dire inheritance faced by the government, in which 1.3 million households are on social housing waiting lists and a record number of households – including 160,000 children – are living in temporary accommodation.
Under new planning rules, updated via the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF):
- Councils will be told to play their part to meet housing need, with new immediate mandatory housing targets for councils to ramp up housebuilding and deliver growth across the country putting more money in working people’s pockets.
- Areas with the highest unaffordability for housing and greatest potential for growth will see housebuilding targets increase, while stronger action will ensure councils adopt up-to-date local plans or develop new plans that work for their communities.
- A new common-sense approach will be introduced to the greenbelt. While remaining committed to a brownfield first approach, the updated NPPF will require councils to review their greenbelt boundaries to meet targets, identifying and prioritising lower quality ‘grey belt’ land.
- Any development on greenbelt must meet strict requirements, via the new ‘golden rules’, which require developers to provide the necessary infrastructure for local communities, such as nurseries, GP surgeries and transport, as well as a premium level of social and affordable housing.
- To further tackle the housing crisis, councils and developers will also need to give greater consideration to social rent when building new homes and local leaders have greater powers to build genuinely affordable homes for those who need them most.
The government has been clear that it supports builders not blockers, as it makes the necessary decisions to deliver for working people across the country.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said:
“For far too long, working people graft hard but are denied the security of owning their own home. I know how important it is - our pebble dash semi meant everything to our family growing up. But with a generation of young people whose dream of homeownership feels like a distant reality, and record levels of homelessness, there’s no shying away from the housing crisis we have inherited.
“We owe it to those working families to take urgent action, and that is what this government is doing. “
“Our Plan for Change will put builders not blockers first, overhaul the broken planning system and put roofs over the heads of working families and drive the growth that will put more money in people’s pockets.
“We’re taking immediate action to make the dream of homeownership a reality through delivering 1.5 million homes by the next parliament and rebuilding Britain to deliver for working people.”
Under the current planning framework just under one third of local authorities have adopted a local plan within the last five years and the number of homes granted planning permission had also been allowed to fall to its lowest level in a decade.
Following consultation, areas must commit to timetables for new plans within 12 weeks the updated NPPF or ministers will not hesitate to use their existing suite of intervention powers to ensure plans are put in place.
Responding to the Government's updated National Planning Policy Framework, Cllr Adam Hug, LGA housing spokesperson said:
“For Councils to share the Government’s ambition to tackle local housing challenges, there must be a collaborative approach. It is councils and communities who know their local areas and are therefore best placed to make judgement decisions on how to manage competing demand for land use through the local plan-led system. Getting housebuilding targets in the right place is a difficult task, so any national algorithms and formulas should be supplemented with local knowledge and involvement by councils and communities who know their areas best.
“Planning is about creating communities linked with the right economic activity and public services, whilst conserving and enhancing the natural and local environment. Local democratic discretion and flexibility need to remain important elements of the planning system.
“Planning reform also needs to be supported by further work to tackle workforce challenges, the costs of construction and the financial headroom of local authorities and housing associations to build the social and truly affordable homes we desperately need.
“In order to deliver the homes we need, government must work with councils and the housebuilding industry to ensure there is a suitable pipeline of sustainable sites, which once allocated in a Local Plan and / or given planning permission, are indeed built out. While councils recognise that swift decision-making on planning applications is critical, with nearly 9 in 10 applications granted, people cannot and do not live in planning permissions. Local authorities must be given greater powers to ensure prompt build out of sites with planning permission, as well as the ability to set planning fees at a local level.”
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