Planning to Meet Future Housing Needs (E)
19/09/2017
Local authorities in wealthier areas of England will no longer be able to dodge their obligations to build new housing stock, under proposals for a new planning system underpinned by a requirement for all authorities to use a standard method to produce a plan of their current and future housing needs.
One of the key proposals in Housing White Paper (E)’ (CPA News, 10 February 2017), the standard method of calculating housing has been designed to help increase the number of new homes planned in areas where average house prices are more than 4 times the national average.
For example, under the proposed method, an area with a projected household growth of 100 a year would have an annual need of
- 100 if average house prices were four times local average earnings
- 125 if average houses prices were eight times local average earnings
- 150 if average house prices were twelve times local average earnings
Communities minister, Sajid Javid, claims the standardised method will also
- play a key role in meeting the need for 225,000 to 275,000 new houses a year identified in the White Paper
- enable local authorities to better manage growth
- cut the estimated £3m pa councils currently spend on hiring consultants
Other elements of the proposed system are concerned with
- a new ‘statement of common ground’, which aims to improve co-operation on planning issues for new homes and supporting infrastructure across council boundaries
- giving neighbourhood planning groups greater certainty on the level of housing need to plan for
- making the use of viability assessments simpler, quicker and more transparent
- increasing planning application fees in those areas where local planning authorities are delivering the homes their communities need
‘Planning for the right homes in the right places: consultation proposals’ links to a ‘Housing need consultation data table’, which uses the proposed method to set out the housing need for each authority, how many homes are currently planned in England and – where available – how many homes the authorities believe they need.
It also links to a separate list of those areas where Her Majesty’s Land Registry intends to prioritise the registration of ownership of all publicly held land.