On Monday 24th March, the most ambitious planning reform in a generation will be debated in the House of Commons. Labour’s’ Planning and Infrastructure Bill is the latest in a number of changes to the planning system, and will be central to the Government’s plan to deliver 1.5 million homes over this Parliament.
What does the Planning and Infrastructure Bill do?
The remit of the Bill goes well beyond housing and targets the planning obstacles to delivery in a number of key areas:
- Simplifying the approval process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs), including by reducing consultation requirements for these.
- Establishing a Nature Restoration Fund for developers to pay into to address issues like nutrient neutrality.
- Compulsory Purchase reform, so that councils can acquire land for social housing at existing use value rather than inflated ‘hope’ value.
- Reforming planning committees, including the introduction of compulsory training and a delegation scheme to empower non-political council officers to make more decisions.
- Introducing sub-regionally developed Spatial Development Strategies to encourage councils to work across their borders.
The Bill also has a number of other measures such as the devolution of planning fees, and reforming and strengthening development corporations to make their roll-out easier.
How will this address the housing crisis?
In essence, the Bill eliminates some important reasons for which homes do not make it through the consenting process, or are stalled after approval.
For instance, introducing a Nature Restoration Fund will help to unlock 160,000 homes blocked by nutrient neutrality rules.
Reforming Compulsory Purchase Orders will also make it easier for local authorities to deliver council homes. Hope value can inflate agricultural land by as much as 275 times its existing value, and can result in councils having to decrease the percentage of social homes on a site.
Measures around spatial development strategies and reforming committees should also help to resolve issues where large sites are made more contentious due to the lack of existing infrastructure. By ensuring that councils are coordinating across boundaries to provide key services, and by ensuring that more decisions are made by council officers, political factors should play less of a role in discretionary planning decisions.
A keystone to other Labour’s plans:
The Bill cannot be seen in isolation, and instead has to be viewed as part of a package of measures which the Government is using to achieve a much-needed uplift in housing delivery.
It comes alongside an update to the National Planning Policy Framework, which restored and strengthened housing targets, alongside allocating low-quality ‘grey belt’ land for high quality developments with affordable and social housing and the enrichment of green space.
There have also been a number of reforms to boost delivery in urban areas, not least the introduction of brownfield planning passports, so that development on brownfield sites automatically goes ahead if it meets local planning requirements. Also in this category are plans to allow for ‘zoning’ around train stations.
Finally, the Government has added £800 million to the Affordable Homes Programme, and refocused it on the delivery of social housing, so that private housebuilding is supplemented with crucial state provision.
Labour’s ‘everything theory of housing’
It was clear from the outset that the Government had a ‘Housing theory of everything’. Solving the housing crisis will be crucial to a number of Labour’s aims to improve living standards, generate growth, and solve the climate crisis, and Labour clearly understands this.
But the way in which they have gone about this programme also shows that they have an ‘everything theory of housing’, using a range of levers to boost delivery, and clearly identifying which issues need solving through primary legislation, which through policy tweaks, and which through further funding.
Doing this alongside passing a generational boost to the rights of private renters, reforming the feudal leasehold system and introducing commonhold as a default tenure, boosting funding for homelessness prevention and setting up a cross-Government homelessness taskforce, increasing resourcing for the Building Safety Regulator and accelerating the remediation of dangerous cladding, investing £3.4 billion into a new Warm Homes Plan, and identifying 100 sites for urban extensions or new towns, shows a Government in hyperdrive to fix this most pressing of crises.
Planning reforms have so far primarily addressed stalled housing delivery in exurban and rural areas, where delivering new homes is, in theory, easiest. Going forward, the Government also needs to tackle other critical barriers to building new homes, such as the cost of building homes, and the construction sector’s skills shortage, not to mention issues around densification and regeneration or urban sites. Looking ahead to the Comprehensive Spending Review, finding ways to support councils building as has been laid out in Red Brick’s 10-year plan for housing series will be welcome to boost much-needed council homes.
But, for the present, the Second Reading debate of the Bill on 24th March should provide an opportunity to celebrate legislation which will meaningfully contribute to ending the housing crisis, and to make the case for how important it will be going forwards for this to remain at the top of the Government’s agenda.