Gideon Amos
Liberal Democrat Spokesperson, Housing and Planning
In December last year, Paul Johnson of the IFS observed that perhaps the most impressive aspect of our new Government was its insistence on the importance of housebuilding, and its willingness in that sphere to take on vested interests.
The PM has said he’s “ripping up the rule book” on rules that protect nature and blamed the “blockers”, a term that has now entered the Westminster lexicon.
However, Johnson and other commentators were right to have doubted that the Government had identified the correct culprit.
Their Planning and Infrastructure Bill, presently moving through the Lords, would empower ministers to permanently end councillors’ rights to take decisions on any category of planning applications future ministers choose.
Instead, Whitehall diktat will rule, disempowering communities. At the same time, the OBR has said Labour will not manage to build one million homes in England by 2029, falling well short of the 1.5 million target.
Housing and planning are by no means an easy fix, but cutting people and nature out of the equation for little result is not the answer.
The Government’s own figures acknowledge that 96 per cent of all planning decisions are already made by planning officers, and councillors approve 90 per cent of applications that come before them.
Development happens best when councils work in tandem with local communities, not when dictated to.
The Government is also reducing the number of bodies that have to be consulted for certain planning applications.
Such measures might initially sound sensible, yet in my 30 years as an architect and planning consultant, I have never seen these statutory consultees hold up a major development.
Even if Sport England does occasionally delay development, are we really happy to lose our playing fields?
One of the Bill’s flagship measures is Environmental Delivery Plans, or EDPs. This would allow developers to effectively dodge certain environmental obligations by paying Natural England to “offset” this elsewhere – perhaps miles from where the actual development is taking place.
While there are specific circumstances where this could be beneficial, details of how this would actually work in practice are scant, to say the least, and protections for our environment hang in the balance as a result – we are already one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.
The National Trust has described this measure as a ‘licence to kill nature’.
No one would object to more efficiency in planning, but this undemocratic centralisation and harming of nature is more soundbite than sound law-making – and for negligible gain.
The real culprit is the failure of the Government, after years of underfunding and mismanagement under the Conservatives, to fund social housing and ensure new developments are built with infrastructure like GPs and healthcare, transport, and drainage and water supply. Oxford Sewage Works are at capacity, and 19,000 homes in Northern Ireland cannot proceed for similar reasons.
Solely depending on private developers will not deliver the results we desperately need to see. Developers, understandably, will not volunteer to build at a rate that will depress the price they can charge for their products.
The Lib Dems have long been calling for a “use it or lose it” approach to major housing permissions to tackle this challenge, but the new Bill is silent on the matter.
Major funding for social housing on a significant scale should not be a controversial proposition.
The last time we built 300,000 homes in a year was in 1969–70 under Harold Wilson, when nearly half were built by local authorities.
By the late 1990s, only 450 homes were built by local authorities. A rejuvenated local authority building sector would kick-start sites across the country.
Our manifesto policy to build 150,000 social homes per year was welcomed by Shelter, among others, after the recent government failure to build genuinely affordable social homes, resulting in record homelessness and skyrocketing rents.
The costs of not investing in social housing speak for themselves.
In 2022/3 the Government spent almost £30 billion on Housing Benefit and Universal Credit Housing Element combined, which went directly to private landlords, and billions in annual costs for temporary accommodation are crippling local authorities.
Only health and social care, defence, and education account for greater shares of day-to-day spending.
Backing social housing is a no-brainer. The Centre for Economics and Business Research found that just one batch of 90,000 social homes would result in a net positive to the Treasury of £11.9 billion over 30 years.
Let’s give communities the infrastructure they desperately need before the new houses get built, and make sure as many as possible are genuinely affordable to local people.
Do that and we will unleash the biggest generation of new homes, working with nature and for people, that this country has seen in decades – and grow our economy at the same time.
Featured image via richardjohnson / Shutterstock.
