Transformative planning reforms could kickstart new era of housebuilding
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill’s reform of landownership would cut the cost of building social homes, says Andrew Lewin, Labour MP for Welwyn Hatfield and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on New Towns
I spent seven years of my career working in the housing sector and it’s now my privilege to chair the APPG on New Towns in parliament.
Life as an MP is very different to my former role, but both the Labour government and the leaders of housing associations can unite around a common objective – the need to build affordable and social homes at scale by 2029.
I am writing on the eve of the second reading of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill in the House of Commons, and do so with optimism and a sense of purpose. This bill can be the catalyst for a new era of housebuilding, where we scale up the delivery of the homes that every reader of Inside Housing will know are so desperately needed.
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We can turn this around, but if we are to succeed, nobody should understate the scale of the housing emergency. The social housing waiting list seems to rise inexorably, with councils scrambling to provide temporary and emergency accommodation to people in grave need.
In parallel, young professionals and families who can’t rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad for help, look on as the prices of potential first homes rise faster than they can save for a deposit. In my own constituency of Welwyn Hatfield, the median house price (£435,000) is nearly 11 times the median income (£39,994).
All of this was compounded by the previous government, which abrogated its responsibility to the millions of people who needed to see action. By walking away from housing targets, the Conservatives sought to indulge a small part of the electorate, instead of levelling with the country about the action that was required.
Housing targets are already back, but it is this piece of reforming legislation that can be transformative.
“Young professionals and families who can’t rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad for help, look on as the prices of potential first homes rise faster than they can save for a deposit”
To get the country building, the bill is focused on rebuilding a strategic planning framework across England. It will place a duty on combined authorities, combined county authorities, upper-tier county councils and unitary authorities to prepare a spatial development strategy in their area.
There are also important reforms to planning committees, establishing a national scheme to provide clarity over which applications are determined by councillors and where the judgement will be made by officers. Democratic accountability is ensured by having votes on local plans, while this measure provides greater certainty for individual applicants, local people and planning officers.
The bill also makes key commitments on nature recovery, creating a Nature Restoration Fund. Responsibility for mitigating the environmental impact of development will move away from multiple project-specific assessments, to a single strategic assessment and delivery plan – a move welcomed by a number of developers and non-governmental organisations alike.
I am especially invested in clause 91 of the bill. This brings in long-overdue changes to the compulsory purchase order (CPO) process and ‘hope value’. For far too long, the losers in our system have been the prospective homeowners or social housing residents; the winners have been the landowners.
For decades, when land has been purchased in the public interest under the CPO scheme, local authorities have, in many cases, had to pay unrealistic premiums for land based on an estimate of the potential, or hope, value of the land, if planning permission is secured. Too often this has made it unviable for councils to build much-needed social housing and infrastructure.
A few years ago, the thinktank Civitas estimated that the reforms to hope value could cut the cost of a national social housing building programme by 38%. It’s also a policy long advocated for by housing charity Shelter.
“For far too long, the losers in our system have been the prospective homeowners or social housing residents; the winners have been the landowners”
Currently, councils have some power to acquire land in the public interest without having to pay hope value. However, these current CPO powers that lie with councils are limited and can be inefficient. The bill will empower councils and elected mayors to take decisions on CPOs and for them to be used more widely when there are plans to build social housing at scale.
Consultancy Arup previously suggested that an increase in the use of the new CPO powers could lead to an additional 4,000 social rent homes per year by 2029-30.
Hope value and questions of landownership might sound niche, but getting this right is central to meeting the housing policy challenge of our time. The original New Towns programme in the late 1940s saw large areas of land being purchased at existing value and then passed to development corporations to manage and invest in social housing and community amenities and infrastructure.
As we look to build our next generation of New Towns, we need a policy framework that gives us the best chance to replicate this success. Our ambition is to build homes and communities today, not just to meet the immediate crisis, but that will still be standing in 100 years’ time.
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill will be crucial in giving us the tools to do the job.
Andrew Lewin, Labour MP for Welwyn Hatfield and chair, APPG on New Towns
