"With too few local planning officers working in a massively under-resourced system, it isn't easy to see how the government's bold high-level plans to unlock new homes will actually be approved at a local level"
- Ritchie Clapson - propertyCEO
Last year Lilt joined Opal Fruits and Marathon in brand Valhalla. The Coca-Cola Company put a lot of effort into reassuring totally tropical-taste fans that “Fanta Pineapple & Grapefruit” would be just the same as it was when the tin said Lilt.
That’s not the message of every rebrand – sometimes a name change is intended to reinforce a much greater transformation. And that will be part of the thinking behind the new Labour government ditching the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities in favour of the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government.
Housing gets top billing, reflecting the magnitude of the task of dealing with the housing landscape Labour inherited – a shortage of 4.3 million homes is being talked about. The new government is aiming to put a huge dent in this by delivering 1.5 million homes within its first five years of office.
Achieving this will not be easy.
Resolve
Everyone wants the housing crisis solved. But there are many people unwilling to accept two major red lines being crossed: no building on the green belt; no building anywhere near where they live. Nimbys are a tricky bunch. So far, the government has said all the right things, but only time will tell whether its resolve will hold up.
The true test of the government's mettle will be whether it's prepared to stomach inevitable local backlashes. A huge majority makes it easier to handle parliamentarians not toeing the party line regarding housing policy, and a few MPs are certain to find themselves stuck between unhappy constituents and uncompromising Whips.
Game plan
The government has announced a number of ideas it's looking to implement, which it believes will unlock the required 1.5 million new homes. One of these is the development of their newly-coined 'grey belt' land. Think of this as green belt land wearing overalls; land bordering our towns and cities that already have some form of development, such as car parks and the like.
There's also been mention of building some new towns. Options include building extended urban towns that abut existing cities, creating extensions to existing cities which are separated by green space, or going all out for multiple versions of Milton Keynes (which has around 125,000 homes).
This latter approach would take a lot more than the length of a single parliament – completing 12 new towns the size of Milton Keynes (including infrastructure, not just dwellings) is a big ask, so new towns can only play a part of long-term plans, not serve as silver bullets.
Arguably, the most critical area being targeted by the government is unused brownfield land. This is land that has already been built on but isn't currently used, including the empty shops and offices that blight our high streets all over the country.
According to countryside charity CPRE, around 1.2 million new homes could be built using redundant brownfield land. Not only does this account for most of the government's target, it's also a vote-winner as no greenfield land is touched, plus it will help bring our town centres back to life. Also, all the infrastructure is already in place.
This represents the quickest route to hitting the target, plus we've got more unused brownfield land becoming available every year.
Reality
Having a plan is one thing, but is it executable?
This is where things get tricky, with a huge obstacle being the planning system, which was last properly updated in 1947. With too few local planning officers working in a massively under-resourced system, it isn't easy to see how the government's bold high-level plans to unlock new homes will actually be approved at a local level.
You can bet your bottom dollar that every green-belt landowner will be arguing that their own fair acres should be designated grey belt, but it will presumably be down to the local planning teams to decide each case on its own merits. Given they have insufficient resources to handle their current workload, I can't see how this will happen. And planning officers are highly skilled; training takes time.
There are around 18,000 planning officers in England currently and the government has committed to recruit 300 more planners, an increase of just 1.7%. This prompts two big questions.
Firstly, is it enough to make a difference? And secondly, where will they be recruited from?
If they aren't already involved in planning, then they’re going to have to be trained first which will necessarily take time before they're going to have much of an impact.
New towns are also one of those ideas that sound great in principle but can prove trickier in practice. One key challenge surrounds affordable homes. The current planning approval process requires housebuilders to build a proportion of homes on their sites at cost.
The government has indicated that it wants 50% of the homes in their new towns to be affordable. But if half of what a developer builds has zero profit, they'll need to increase their margin from the other 50%.
This is unlikely to be viable which may mean that new town projects prove unattractive commercially to developers. The government will need to devise another way of tackling the problem. This could involve allowing a small (albeit restricted) profit on affordable homes or having a tiered system whereby more profit is permitted based on the percentage of affordable homes the developer creates on any given site.
Another new town challenge is that we don't have a recent poster child to shout about. Milton Keynes was built over 50 years ago, and our most recent effort, Northstowe in Cambridgeshire, began with a target of 10,000 homes, yet, only 1,500 have been built.
The town fell victim to the country's dire planning system, with too few local amenities being built to support the people moving in: no high street, pubs, or cafes. If the government is to convince people that new towns are the way forward, they'll need to learn from the failures of their predecessors and ensure that these communities will be of good quality.
This means ensuring that amenities are available for early adopters and that the planning system is fit for purpose.
Opportunity
What about brownfield redevelopment? A challenge here is that this sort of project doesn't appeal to the scale housebuilders who typically create new buildings in large fields – they don't have the skills or appetite to repurpose existing buildings on smaller sites. This opportunity instead falls to smaller developers, often solo entrepreneurs and investors, and this is where the government needs to provide some support.
We've had nearly a decade of the previous government targeting landlords and property investors to the point where the buy-to-let investment model barely stacks up. Yet these are precisely the people who could readily turn their hand to small-scale development projects – in fact, many already do refurbs, flips, and buy-to-let upgrades.
It could be a great win-win for the government: help unlock potential new homes from brownfield land while at the same time encouraging entrepreneurship and wealth creation opportunities for individuals.
No matter where you lean politically, what's not to like about that?
