You can’t fault Labour’s commitment to hit the ground running when it comes to housebuilding, with the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, reiterating the pledge to build one and a half million new homes, followed by Angela Rayner’s speech last week outlining an overhaul of planning rules designed to help deliver that commitment.
But the Conservative government never hit its target of 300,000 new homes a year – in fact, 300,000 new builds has not been achieved for more than 40 years – so is it really realistic to think Labour can build even more – some 370,000 a year?
Let’s take the pledge to build on redundant areas of green belt. Around a fifth of land in the London alone is classified as green belt, located within the city and 35 miles beyond. A large proportion of it is now far removed from the bucolic countryside the term conjures up and includes land such as vacant car parks and disused airfields.
It’s estimated that building on the 35,000 hectares of green belt land within the capital’s border could deliver close to half a million homes. Building on such land in a planned, sensible and sustainable way could therefore deliver a significant proportion of Labour’s target – and in a part of the country that is most in need of housing.
But a stumbling block could be Labour requiring local authorities to start a process of ‘regularly reviewing’ their green belt boundaries to ensure they hit housing targets. Flexing its muscles to force local authorities build more homes may prove to be more difficult than the threat of it: many councils have been generally reluctant to meet existing housebuilding targets, let alone look beyond these.
And while Keir Starmer has warned Labour are ‘prepared to make enemies to get Britain building’, this will be easier said than done, as the Conservatives found out to their cost at the Chesham and Amersham by-election.
The Government has also said it is willing to overturn local decisions. The number of planning applications reviewed – known as being ‘called in’ – by the secretary of state for housing averaged more than 50 annually during the 2000s, but this dropped to just five in the previous financial year. Yes, a Labour housing secretary could be more ruthless, but any applications that are called in are likely to result in lengthy appeal processes, delaying any development.
As for Labour’s pledge to recruit an additional 300 planning officers to increase the rate of planning permissions, this is unlikely to make much difference. Funding for planning departments has been cut by more than 40% since 2010, so planners are already on the back foot. As a result, 80% of major planning applications were not resolved within the statutory period of 13 weeks between October and December last year, according to official statistics.
A particular problem is that planning officers’ time is often tied up with minor applications for house improvements. This means less capacity to focus on larger applications. One thing Labour could do is to outsource parts of the planning process. This wouldn’t be an entirely new concept: for building regulations, the approved inspector role was privatised, so the same could happen for the planning process right up to committee stage.
This would mean the private sector carrying out procedural functions – processing applications, putting noticeboards up around sites, writing notes for the planning committee, and setting out the positions available to applicants – leaving planning officers free to deal with strategy and policy. The elected planning committee would continue to act as gatekeeper by considering applications once brought to committee. In fact, this idea isn’t a great leap from what has been introduced in some local authorities – some years ago, for example, Westminster City Council, for example, used three staff directly paid for by developers to speed up reserved matters applications.
Governments of all stripes for years have said they’ll reform the planning system – and singularly failed, because the planning system generally is overly bureaucratic, with other sectors beyond just housing struggling to get timely decisions.
Labour’s proposals are ambitious, but right now the planning pledges are just that: we’ll need to see some early wins before we can assess whether or not the commitment is realistic.
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