Earlier this month the government announced that they were giving in to the Tory rebels and scrapping the mandatory house building targets for councils. This is going to have implications that will go far beyond even the wide-reaching nature of the housing crisis.
For those unfamiliar with housing targets, each local authority is given a target for the number of new dwellings that have to be built within its boundaries over a revolving five-year period.
We have this rule because, as we all know, we don’t build anything like the number of new houses we need in the country to satisfy our growing population (among other things) and councils generally have a poor record of delivering them.
The targets are mandatory and failing to deliver on them comes at a cost. Developers challenge refusals via the appeals system and, if the appeal officer agrees that the housing target is not being met, the presumption to build is weighted heavily in favour of the development and appeals are then frequently granted.
This is obviously a system that frustrates a lot of people. In Worthing, Persimmon applied to build hundreds of houses on an area of fields separating Worthing from Goring known as “the Goring Gap”.
It’s an area designated as green space and key to Worthing’s local plan to stay as such. Permission’s planning application was refused – there were hundreds and hundreds of objections.
But it was then overturned on appeal because of Worthing’s chronic inability to get anywhere near its five-year housing supply target.
What should we think of this? Is that where locals want housing? No. Is it even a good place for it? Maybe not. But Worthing needs more housing and they weren’t delivering it so effectively the government forced it on them as a measure of last resort.
I think we can agree it’s far from a perfect solution but it does at least (in theory) make councils work with land owners and developers to try to deliver the housing the country needs.
The purpose of these housing targets then is to make councils like Worthing pro-active and deliver new, frequently denser, housing in their urban areas so they can protect their green belt if they wish while providing the share of the housing the country needs.
Smaller councils will decide where to allocate their share via local consultation and so on. Brighton and Hove has only built on 28 per cent of its area and 34 per cent of it is farm land. It avoids losing that area partially by its designation but also by continuing to push forward urban regeneration.
The big issue with the housing targets is the massive disparity across the country, particularly between cities and everyone else.
In very broad terms, city councils generally try to satisfy the need for housing because they mostly have pro-growth agendas. They want new business, want wealth creation, want diverse youth coming through, want employment – and you can’t do that unless you have places for people to live.
Migration within this country primarily shows a move towards cities and those moves are mostly made by younger people. This has always been the case to some extent but it has accelerated over time, with perhaps a covid blip. That means new housing – and hopefully plenty of it “affordable” – needs to be continuously built in urban areas.
Outside of our cities, the mood is very different. New housing development on the edge of a supposedly picturesque village? No thanks. Potential for more traffic and pollution? No chance.
What about a “new town” full of affordable housing, new schools and highly sustainable properties with good transport links all paid for by the developer?
If there’s anything of ecological value (there always is) you’ll be fighting that campaign for the next decade. Or more.
It now seems that these targets will become “advisory” if councils can say they will change the character of the area. We are yet to see what the threshold is for that test, but it seems likely it will be low with every development having some kind of effect. What will be the result?
In cities, not that much. Targets here could actually be a distraction, frustrating master planning and sometimes leading to the approval of otherwise unwanted, poor-quality proposals. It will give city councils more control and it won’t stop them building.
Everywhere else, it’s going to signal huge change. These rural and semi-rural areas that are anti-development are not going to be building much once this bill goes through. They don’t want housing and now they won’t have to deliver it.
Housing prices in those areas will certainly increase as demand will accelerate past supply even more. That will not bother the majority of residents. They are quite happy to be sitting on their wealth and passing it down to their children.
And so this is much bigger than just housing, if that were possible. We are, like many other Western countries a divided nation. Politically our youth and our urban dwellers lean one way and our elder and rural dwellers another.
This change will further accelerate youth migration to cities, looking for employment, wealth and housing that these areas will no longer want or have to provide. Our politics will become even more entrenched on the divide between ages and locations.
It cannot be good for anyone, least of all the people driving it, but I doubt they’ll care one bit. In fact, they’ll be very, very pleased.
Ed Deedman is a director of Cayuga Homes.
One of the challenges of the planning system is that it relies largely on developers bringing forward plans and planning officers or councillors having to make a binary choice, yes or no. It’s possible for councils to draw up planning briefs for a site or an area, with greater detail than a strategic local plan, but that requires vision, staffing and funding. And as for the compulsory purchasing of land for development, it’s understandably rare, not least for financial reasons. It’s a shame that there can’t be a better dialogue between the developers and the decision-makers.
Need to multiply that “affordable housing” figure by x100 per year.
Problem is, affordable housing doesn’t come by way of a label, it comes by way of building enough homes to meet demand, which is extremely difficult when so many selfish greedy boomers are in our midst who will happily spend much of their retirement thinking only of themselves and object to every planning application they can get their greedy hands on.
We ought publish the names and addresses of all people objecting to new homes being built so the public can see who their serial anti-social neighbours are, and to deny the most aggressive areas funding of any kind to maintain services and infrastructure where their cohorts herd together to be a menace to society.