Sunak’s Disastrous New Statement ‘Little Point trying to force large new estates on our countryside’ will come back to haunt him and lead to a further collapse in Housebuilding @mtpennycook

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…To solve the housing challenge, we must ask not just “how many”, but “where”. We need to build homes in the places where people need and want them. There’s little point trying to force large new estates on our countryside and green belt when that is where public resistance to development is strongest and where the GP surgeries, schools and roads don’t exist to support new communities. I also believe deeply in the need for careful stewardship of our beautiful natural landscapes. And we must give local communities a say. We won’t solve the housing challenge if we simply ignore people’s concerns or bulldoze through local opposition. All that would build is resentment.

Instead, we need to build more in cities — especially on brownfield sites, where we could build well over a million homes. That’s why we’ve rewritten planning rules to better protect the green belt and encourage more development in urban centres. We’ve announced plans to support new homes in cities like Leeds and Cambridge. And we are announcing steps to go further today.

That starts in London. Nowhere in the country is the dream of home ownership more out of reach than in the capital. The mayor, Sadiq Khan, has had eight years to fix this crisis but has failed. His own plan says that our capital city needs 66,000 new homes a year. Yet last year he delivered only 35,000. And this creates problems further afield: the failure to build up in the heart of the capital pushes developers outwards, putting pressure on the suburbs and countryside that we want to protect.

Because of this, the government has been forced to step in. Today, we’re publishing an independent review of London’s housing plan. The conclusions are stark and worrying: “The combined effect of the multiplicity of policies in the London Plan now works to frustrate rather than facilitate the delivery of new homes.” In other words, while the government is getting on with building homes, Labour is blocking them and building only bureaucracy. To fix this, we’re going to accept the review’s recommendation to introduce a presumption in favour of brownfield development in places where not enough homes are being built, giving a leg up in the planning system to schemes that deliver new homes and bring abandoned land back into use.

But this isn’t just a London problem. We need to encourage the use of brownfield sites in towns and cities right across the country.

Our new policy will do this, giving developers an incentive to go for brownfield over green sites. We’re changing the complex planning rules to make it easier to build. And we’re going to introduce a new law to make it easier for all commercial buildings to be turned into homes. This will help revitalise high streets by allowing empty units to be turned into places for people to live.

Our long-term plan for housing is working. We’re building the homes people want in the places where they are needed, while still protecting our precious green spaces. The choice is to stick with our plan and let us finish the job, or risk going back to square one with the Labour Party’s dangerous ideas about tarmacking over the green belt. I think the answer is clear. Let’s stick to the plan — and build a brighter future for this country.

Its contrary to the brand new NPPF which has a presumption in favour of accessible development even in countryside when no 5YHLS.

Will be interpreted by cllrs, like Boris speech to conference a few years ago as a change in policy, which it isn’t.

Will lead to refusals by members up and down the countryside – we are doing what Rishi wants.

In London the review says even with an increase to capacity London will be 10k a year a year short of need, Rishi where will that housing go?

Rishi CPRE say 1 1/2 million of the 5 million houses we need till 2050 can go on Brownfield – so you are saying Rishi you plan deliberately to not build the other 3 1/2 million – is that your policy?

Will cause chaos, like Boris’s speech and Goves capitulation to Tersa Villiers, and be reversed within a couple of months. Is politics as performance art, trying to divert from what national policy actually says till after the general election.

Gove Publishes Katowski Review into London Plan

As part of the raft of measures today , Gove has published the KitKat review, nearly a month after receiving it.

No one disputes that London is experiencing a significant housing crisis. Over the long term, the supply of new homes has not kept pace with increases in jobs, population and housing demand. The current London Plan sets a capacity-based ten-year target of 52,300 homes each year from 2019/20 to 2028/29, within a context of its assessment of need of around 66,000 homes per annum. 3 Four years into that ten-year period, when measured against the cumulative target, there has been an undersupply of more than 60,000 homes, more than a year of equivalent supply…

Public and private sector stakeholders are clear in their view that the London Plan is not the sole source of the problem: wider macro-economic conditions; fire safety; infrastructure constraints; statutory consultees; viability difficulties; and planning resourcing pressures have all contributed. 8 However, there is persuasive evidence that the combined effect of the multiplicity of policies in the London Plan now works to frustrate rather than facilitate the delivery of new homes, not least in creating very real challenges to the viability of schemes. We heard that policy goals in the Plan are being incorrectly applied mechanistically as absolute requirements: as ‘musts’ rather than ‘shoulds’.

What is missing from the London Plan is a policy mechanism to assist applicants and decisionmakers in navigating a path that aligns with the intended goal of boosting housing supply to the level outlined in the London Plan strategy.

It recommends the following policy – which appears to not go beyond (except for SIL) proposed national policy

The Presumption For qualifying local planning authorities, there is a strong presumption in favour of granting planning permission for proposals which comprise or include residential development on Brownfield (Previously developed) land. Qualifying local planning authorities are those where the net housing completions since 2019/20 have fallen below the cumulative annualised total of their Table 4.1 ten-year target. The presumption does not apply to sites which are in the Green Belt or Metropolitan Open Land or a Strategic Industrial Location. In the case of proposals which would cause harm to the significance of a designated heritage asset, the presumption only applies where any such harm is clearly outweighed by the public benefits of the proposals. Where it applies, the presumption means granting planning permission as quickly as possible unless the benefits of doing so would be significantly and demonstrably outweighed by any adverse impacts which would arise from not according with policies in this plan. In applying the presumption substantial weight is to be given to the benefits of delivering homes.

The report is deplyb dissapointing and appears to have completely ignored its brief

‘The expert advisers will assess whether there are specific changes to London Plan policies that could facilitate urban brownfield regeneration in London for housing delivery in an appropriate manner and, if necessary, recommend changes to the London Plan accordingly.’

The recommendations are procedural not policy, and concern national policy more than local policy. There is not a single analysis of a single London Plan policy, underlying the rushed and political nature of the review designed to conceal the aspect of the fall in housebuilding due to the cuts in government affordable housing expenditure, rushed out before mayoral election purdah.

CPS says National Housing Target Needs to Rise to over 500k a year

As we have long said here

CPS

The national housing target for England adopted by the Government in December 2020 derives from analysis produced by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) in 2016, which looked at outturn data for 2012

The 2016 analysis predicted that the net rate of household formation in England would be around 214,000 per annum in the coming years. This assumed that: – The average household size of 2.36 in 2012 would gradually trend down to 2.22 by 2037 – Net migration would run at about 170,500 per annum – New arrivals would, on average, form households of the same size as the existing population This formula implied that there would be around 72,250 new migrant households formed every year, i.e. that net migration was responsible for almost exactly a third of underlying housing demand.

Once that figure had been arrived at, various tweaks and adjustments were then made to reflect market trends, regional differences, historic underbuilding and wider questions of affordability (especially in the big cities). That resulted in the 300,000 figure for annual housing need in England – 297,605 to be precise.

Now, obviously this is all fairly imprecise. The ONS has revised its household formation figures more than once since those estimates.

It has also cautioned that household formation estimates should not be used to make definitive claims about housing need – a point echoed by the CPS, not least due to the way the housing crisis appears to have suppressed household formation on a very significant scale (just look at the huge rise in the number of adults living with their parents).

Indeed, given that a household is by definition a collection of people living in a home, household formation is largely a function of housebuilding, rather than an external and independent variable. The Government’s approach is also open to criticism in that it does not take sufficient account of the geographic distribution of housing demand, which is intensely concentrated in London and the SouthEast.

But still – this is the methodology the Government has adopted. And it is obviously the case that, given that methodology, higher net migration should mean a higher level of housing need. Taking the Government’s methods at face value, existing population growth and wider market trends are generating a need for 225,360 homes to be built each year. Then net migration of 170,500 adds the need for another 72,250 homes each year (dividing by household size).

The problem, of course, is that net migration is not running at 170,500, or anything like it. We know that around 90% of immigrants come to England rather than the other parts of the UK.

So to get a figure for the impact of additional net migration on that housing target, we can multiply the UK net migration figure by 0.9, and then subtract the 170,500 migrants already assumed in the housing target. If we plug the net migration data for 2022 into this equation, we get the following: 297,605 + ((745,000*0.9) – 170,500 migrants)/2.3 = 514,996 houses So this suggests that we should have built around 515,000 homes in England in 2022 – 73% higher than the official target. In fact, there were only around 177,810 dwelling completions in England in 2022,13 barely 35% of what we needed to match estimated growth in housing need.