Liberal Democrat councillor calls for transition phase for housing planning targets

One of the proposals is making the standard method for assessing housing needs mandatory, “requiring local authorities to plan for the resulting housing need figure, planning for a lower figure only when they can demonstrate hard constraints and that they have exhausted all other options”.

However, at a fringe session on Monday debating the reforms, Ms Townsend said targets will be difficult to achieve in her local authority area. 

She told delegates: “I don’t think there is anybody at all that doesn’t want more housing. And everybody, when I’m knocking on the doors, they’re saying they want housing for their children, for their grandchildren; older people [want] to downscale. 

“But we do have a bit of a crisis with the new planning proposals. We need to address that and accept it. Where I’m from, our housing number from our last local plan – we’re at the stages of preparing a new local plan – but our last local plan was 590 houses per annum under the standard method, [under] the last standard method that went up to 710 and now it’s gone up to 1,374. We’ve got an affordability ratio uplift of 203%.”

She said that over the past couple of years, the council has delivered “good numbers” of housing, but there has been a “struggle” to meet its targets. 

“And it’s not that we haven’t delivered enough planning permissions. Planning permissions are built out extremely slowly. We’ve even given permission for a new garden village, and that’s been excruciatingly slow. 

“And so we need to address this issue. We need to find out how we can unlock the existing permissions that we have, which for us is about 6,000,” Ms Townsend said. 

The councillor called for “some mechanism” to make developers build homes in a “quicker fashion”. She also said there must be recognition that the construction industry “needs more skills, needs more workers” and “that isn’t going to happen overnight”.

“We need more planning officers,” she said, adding that “we need to have a workforce strategy to address those issues”.

At a session on Sunday, Baroness Dorothy Thornhill said the UK is not capable of hitting housing targets because of a “crisis” in the construction workforce.

Labour previously announced that it would fund 300 planning officers, but the figure has been criticised as it does not equate to one for every council in England. 

Ms Townsend said that her local authority area is “constrained” in terms of being able to develop, adding that nearly two-thirds is green belt, while 76% of Waverley is covered by the Surrey Hills National Landscape.

She said ‘grey belt’, a new category of land created by the Labour government for green belt that has little civic or environmental value, would be “very limited” in the area. 

“So we are looking at a scenario where it will take quite a bit of time for us to get to a position where we can look at increasing our housing numbers, and that’s what we haven’t got.

“At the moment, we’re in a tilted balance position. Basically, if you don’t meet your housing targets, then your planning policies get diluted, and you are forced to give permission on sites which are probably less sustainable and definitely not in your local plan,” Ms Townsend said.

She added that she “can’t see that changing because of these increased housing numbers”.

She said: “I want to deliver more houses, but I want to deliver them within a planning-led system that supplies the infrastructure.

“We have crumbling roads, but we also have regular interruptions in water supply. We have inadequate sewage infrastructure. We have water quality issues in our local rivers,” Ms Townsend said.

She said there needs to be a “national plan to help [her] to deliver” infrastructure. 

“We need government to recognise that, and we need a transition phase. We can’t just have these numbers overnight. We need to have numbers that build over years.”

A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: “We are in a housing crisis so all areas of the country, including Waverley, must play their part in ending it by building the homes we need.

“We will work in partnership with councils so we can deliver 1.5 million homes over the next five years, while ensuring that we also create the vital infrastructure that people need in their communities.”