The Thinkhouse review of housing research: May

These issues are researched further in the papers Home Improvements: action to address the housing challenges faced by young people (published by the Resolution Foundation’s Intergenerational Commission) and A Sustainable Increase in London’s Housing Supply? (published by LSE London).

Both these papers provide wide-ranging recommendations for policymakers to address the housing crisis, including improving access to housing for those on middle incomes (particularly younger people), and introducing a much greater level of flexibility to enable housing providers to react to housing markets when making strategic housing decisions.

In particular, the Home Improvements paper suggests wholesale reform to the private rented sector by increasing regulation and requiring private landlords to grant long-term tenancies.

This would change the landscape of private rent dramatically but the research suggests that such a change would see a sizeable reduction in the number of young people who are currently unable to access good quality private rented housing, which it is hoped would help relieve the pressure on affordable housing providers.

The final piece of research I want to examine in this article is entitled Planning risk and development: how greater planning certainty would affect residential development. It is a joint piece by the London School of Economics, University College London and the Royal Town Planning Institute. It is a timely piece considering the closure of the government consultation on the National Planning Policy Framework on 10 May.

The paper examines whether a mechanism to enable developers to obtain planning permission in principle (PiP) would have a beneficial impact on new developments to deliver the housing required to deal with some of the issues raised in the papers discussed earlier in this article. As the paper ascertains, there are many policy and practical issues which may affect the efficiency of the PiP proposal.

“The analysis in this paper will be of interest to any housing provider which develops its own housing stock.”

One of the concerns the paper raises is whether PiP would deliver any cost efficiencies if developers (who often already build a planning uncertainty contingency into their pricing) use this as an additional opportunity to increase their profit margins by requiring post-planning financial viability assessments once full permissions are granted. The other significant issue is whether the limited local authority resources available are best applied to dealing with another layer of planning process.

As a lawyer, I find it interesting to note (as the paper points out) that there are already a number of ways to achieve more certainty in the planning process before a permission is granted – such as outline planning permission and pre-application consultation with the planners. It does appear from this research that policymakers acknowledge that in practice these existing options do not always offer the certainty that may be required to kick-start development, particularly on more complex or controversial sites.

The analysis in this paper will be of interest to any housing provider that develops its own housing stock as it examines a potential new solution to planning uncertainty which could unlock tricky stalled developments.

Although this article examines only four publications, there are several other interesting pieces of research on the Thinkhouse repository. Please get in touch if you would like the panel to consider your research for the next edition.

Suzanne Benson, partner, Trowers & Hamlins, and editorial panel member, Thinkhouse