Tim Foreman, Managing Director of Land and New Homes, Leaders Romans Group (LRG):

Housing targets

I am pleased with the optimism that the government is showing towards the delivery of new homes.  The delivery of 1.5 million homes in the current Parliament is unarguably necessary to meet current housing need and compensate for years of under-delivery.

But it is ambitious, not only in the figures but in the implementation too.

Affordable housing targets

From my clients’ point of view, the key point is the 50% affordable / social housing requirement for certain developments. While developers fully understand the need for more affordable housing, the issue is in the deliverability.  With high labour and build costs an increasing raft of ‘planning gain’ requirements – biodiversity net gain, CIL and increasingly SANG too, viability is a growing issue. There are circumstances in which a development of 1,000 homes with 30% affordable housing is viable but 50% affordable housing is not.  And yet surely 1,000 homes of which 300 are affordable housing, as compared to none at all, is preferable?

The government needs to fully understand the pressures that the industry faces and the fact that profits are all too often minimal. Increasing co-operation with developers – for example, in allowing more car parking spaces to benefit marketability – would be a step the right direction.

Similarly, where affordable housing requirements are increased, there should a balance whereby other requirements, such as funding for transport, is reduced.

Timing

Another aspect in which today’s Statement is possibly over-ambitious is timing.  Clearly the government has made housing delivery a priority – as is demonstrated in the fact that the NPPF will be in place by September.  But planning is notoriously slow. The government is set to deliver 1.5 million homes in five years, by 2029 – but due to the speed of planning and development, the first home is unlikely to be occupied until 2027. The number of homes to be delivered between 2027-9 will be unprecedented.

To address this, my suggestion would be a Planning & Development Taskforce – a government agency with the sole objective of speeding up planning applications. Its first priority would be enforcing local plan production and implementation, by ensuring that local authorities are singing from the same hymn sheet as the government. It would also need to put in place special delivery vehicles for delivering new towns because there is no way in which the ambitious housing targets can be met without new towns – but the creation of an entirely new community a long and complex process.

The government’s intention to reinvigorate the call in-process is a positive one. But it doesn’t speed up individual planning applications so much as reduce the likelihood of refusal – again, the process takes considerable time.

Local Plan

Furthermore, while it’s encouraging that the Secretary of State has said that every local authority must have up to date local plan, this was the case until recently and it didn’t result in universal delivery. Even with penalties applies, some local authorities rebelled, to the point that a large proportion are now without an up-to-date local plan. I do not have faith in local plan production being significantly increased until I can be convinced that the mechanisms have been put in place to achieve this.