We have a housing
crisis in the UK.
If we are to address it properly, as well as act on many
other fronts, we need to build about 250,000 new homes every year, probably for
the next 20 or 30 years.
In 2007, there were more than 5,000 firms building between
one and 10 houses a year. Now, there are fewer than 3,000 such firms. We have
seen a collapse in the small- and medium-sized builder market and increasing
dominance of the big house-builders, focused on their profit-and-loss accounts
rather than on needs-driven development across England.
The previous Labour government did not build enough homes.
The present government is building even fewer.
Back in 2010, I questioned Grant Shapps, then Housing Minister,
now Conservative Party Chairman, about his housing strategy. He said:
“I am very critical of our predecessors for raising expectations which
they then completely dashed and failed to meet. We have already talked about
the numbers, the lowest housebuilding in peacetime since 1924. That’s
unacceptable. We have to do a lot better.”
I pressed him further, asking:
“So do we take it that success for this government…will be building
more homes per year than were being built prior to the recession and that
failure will be building less?”
Grant Shapps replied:
“Yes. Building more homes is the gold standard upon which we shall be
judged.”
Clearly, this government has never got its tracksuit off,
let alone got on the pitch with medal ambitions.
However, to build the number of new homes we require, we
also need a planning system that commands public support, nationally and
locally.
So, in 2011, the all-party communities and local government
committee - which I chair -insisted that, within the proposed National Planning
Policy Framework (NPPF), sustainable development required consideration of
environmental and social issues as well as economic ones.
We said that the presumption that any planning application
should be agreed unless it could be proved that ‘the adverse effects significantly and demonstrably outweigh the
benefits’ was just unacceptable, and ran counter to the very notion of
sustainable development.
We were convinced that the priority for development must be
‘brownfield first’, with shop and
office developments concentrated on existing town and district centres, not on
new green-field or out-of-centre sites.
We also agreed that new planning legislation should
unambiguously confirm the supremacy of local plans and that local planning
decisions had to be consistent with the local plan. We said it was unacceptable
that so many councils had yet to develop and adopt a new local plan. If they
were serious about localism, this would be their chance to prove it.
Now come forward three years to the report
we published in December 2014 on the NPPF. We concluded that, in principle
and intention, the reform of the NPPF was correct but not every aspect worked
as expected.
Leaving aside the massive shortfall in housing development,
we also concluded that developers were taking advantage of loopholes in the
framework to launch ‘speculative’ planning applications leading to unwanted
developments, especially on the edge of towns and villages, contrary to the
wishes of local communities.
This problem is particularly acute when a local plan or
five-year supply of housing land is not in place. In these cases, developers
take advantage of the absence of the plan or five-year supply to seek planning
permission in areas that local communities do not consider suitable for
development.
The NPPF is designed to work side-by-side with local plans.
Fewer than 60% of local authorities have an adopted local plan. That is simply
not good enough. There now must be a statutory requirement for councils to get
local plans adopted within the next three years.
As part of our evidence gathering, far too often we heard
that developers were claiming sites were unviable in order to obtain planning
permission on other, more lucrative sites against the wishes of the council and
community. In doing so, they are undermining and delaying the local planning
process.
When our report was debated, MPs of all parties and from all
areas confirmed that the government’s planning strategy was simply allowing the
developers to decide where new homes were built and that this is quite
unacceptable.
We believe that requiring all sites with planning permission
to be counted towards an authority’s five-year supply will help put a stop to
this behaviour and give communities greater protection.
Such changes will help develop plans with wide public
support.
Then, we’ll need new policies to build more homes.
This article was first
published in the Local Government Chronicle on 6th February 2015 at
