Angela Rayner has announced an overhaul of the planning system to pave the way for 1.5 million new homes over the next five years to tackle England’s acute housing crisis.

Mandatory housing targets, scrapped by the previous Conservative government, will be restored and some low-quality green belt land will be freed up for construction under the plans.

The deputy prime minister & housing secretary will reverse changes made to the National Planning Policy Framework by Rishi Sunak’s administration she said had tanked housing supply.

She unveiled forecasts that fewer than 200,000 new homes would be built in 2024-25 under Tory policies – far below their annual 300,000 target.

In a statement to MPs on Tuesday before they depart for the summer recess, Ms Rayner said: ‘In a bid to appease their anti-housing backbenchers, they made housing targets only advisable.

‘They knew that this would tank housing supply, but they still did it.’

The Labour frontbencher said her ‘radical plan’ will help ‘get the homes we desperately need’, as well as ‘drive the growth, create jobs and breathe life back into towns and cities’.

Her reforms make explicit that the default answer to brownfield development should be ‘yes’ and promote housebuilding at greater densities in urban centres, like towns and cities.

However, because there is not enough brownfield land in the country to meet housing needs, the Government will allow the targeted release of so-called grey belt land, which includes disused petrol stations and car parks on parts of protected land known as the green belt.

Any green belt land released will be subject to ‘golden rules’ to ensure the development delivers 50% affordable homes with a focus on social rent, and has access to green spaces and infrastructure such as schools and GP surgeries.

The method for local authorities to calculate how much land they must allocate for new housing, which relied on data from 2014, will be updated to ensure stock is boosted in every part of the country.

Rayner said: ‘Rather than relying on outdated data, this new method will require local authorities to plan for homes proportionate to the size of existing communities, and it will incorporate an uplift where house prices are most out of step with local incomes.

‘The collective total of these local targets will therefore rise from some 300,000 a year to just over 370,000 a year.’

Ministers are also laying the groundwork for universal local plan coverage across England.

With only a third of councils currently having a plan that is under five years old, ministers will be ready to intervene to ensure they all have one in place by a specified point next year, taking over a local plan if insufficient progress is made.

Rayner also unveiled immediate measures to counter the decline in the number of social and affordable housing through new flexibilities for councils, including allowing them to use their right-to-buy receipts to build and buy more social homes.

‘Today I’m calling on local authorities, housing associations and industry to work with me to deliver a council house revolution,’ Rayner told the Commons, promising the ‘biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation’.

Details of Government investment in the form of direct grant funding for social and affordable housing, as well as on rent stability, will be brought forward at the autumn Spending Review.

Labour also intends to drop the requirement for new homes to be ‘beautiful’, introduced by the Conservatives, arguing it is subjective, difficult to define and leads to inconsistent decision-making on applications.

The ruling party’s manifesto used different language, outlining instead its aim for ‘exemplary’ development to be ‘the norm not the exception’.

Rayner defended the cut to London’s annual homes target from 100,000 to 80,000, saying the previous ambition ‘based on an arbitrary uplift was absolute nonsense’ and that the Mayor of London ‘is determined to rise to’ the new target.

But Sam Richards, chief executive of pro-growth campaign group Britain Remade, said: ‘It is a mistake to cut London’s 100,000 homes per year target by 20,000.

‘London has Britain’s most acute housing shortage, and cities across the world show that 100,000 homes per year can be done.’

He added that the revised ‘NPPF contains a number of necessary changes’ and that ‘it is right that housing targets are now based on affordability and that they are tougher, while breaking the taboo on the green belt is brave and necessary’.

Victoria Hills, chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute, said the proposed changes ‘have the potential to rebuild trust in our planning system’.

‘It is particularly encouraging to see the government placing a much-needed emphasis on strategic planning, which can help deliver more coherent – not piecemeal – urban expansions by integrating new housing with transportation, energy, and public services.’

The new draft NPPF will go out to consultation for eight weeks from Tuesday.

By Sophie Wingate, PA Deputy Political Editor

source: PA

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