Planning changes – “divorced from the reality of how the housebuilding market currently operates”

Sarah Calkin, editor of the Local Government Chronicle, writing in relation to the government’s planning changes, writes that

“The government’s analysis – that the country is in the grip of an acute housing crisis and urgent action is needed – is not disputed. But its unrelenting portrayal of the planning system and local democracy as the only blocker to the building of the homes the country needs is not only one sided but divorced from the reality of how the housebuilding market currently operates.”

As the Town and Country Planning Association has said, you don’t live in planning permissions. There are more than a million plots of land granted planning permission that have not been built on. Sarah Calkin says that if you talk to anyone in local government trying to get homes built and “they will talk about a ‘cartel’ of major homebuilders who sit on sites and don’t build them and “game the system of five year land supply to maintain their profit levels, They are “primarily interested in building on greenfield sites nowhere near existing infrastructure, thus perpetuating reliance on the car.”

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Councillors fear that the government’s proposals will hand even more power to developers. Sarah Calkin says

“This is because landowners, often the very same housebuilders, will be able to argue a particular site is not deliverable within five years, thus the council is no longer able to demonstrate a five year land supply and the presumption in favour of development applies.”

At the same time as the housing targets are being imposed, proposed changes to planning committee rules are designed to concentrate even more power in the hands of unelected planning officers. This is despite the fact that 96% of applications are dealt with by officers. If implemented, these changes would make it even more difficult for local people to scrutinise, influence or oppose applications.

Even the Tory housing and planning spokesperson for the County Councils Network recognises that the problem lies with this ‘cartel’. Wiltshire Council leader Richard Clewer, speaking on a recent episode of the LGC’s podcast, said the government was taking the “easy option” of being assured by developers that all they need is more permissions, despite the last 30 years of housing policy demonstrating this “comprehensively” does not work.

“When you look at the actual build out rates they are so metronomically consistent there is no way that those developers are going to speed up the build out rates of the existing permissions they’ve got because if they did they might actually reduce the value of the houses they’re turning out at the other end and that will hit their bottom line.”

Hugh Ellis of the Town and Country Planning Association is predicting the government will have to rethink its approach in a couple of years’ time.

“The problem is the private sector… they restrict supply, they have not invested in skills and capacity so they can’t up their game and yet we’re going to hand the system to them and expect them to deliver the infrastructure, housing and affordable housing that the nation needs. Failing to empower councils to take on the private sector’s role in low housing supply is a missed opportunity that flies in the face of the government’s other stated aims to devolve more power to those with “skin in the game”.”

The large volume housebuilders will not build homes on the basis of social need. The market is rigged in support of their efforts to maximise profits and the dividends of shareholders. The only means of beginning to resolve the housing crisis is council and social rent housing. Unless the government provides the funding for a renaissance of council housing then the acute housing crisis will drag on, and the large voume housebuilders continue to rake in the profits, whilst millions are left trapped in the poor quality and expensive private rental sector.