The Government’s stance on housebuilding and planning should be welcomed and its 1.5 million target should be considered a floor, not a ceiling, to housebuilding.
We have to find a route to building the 1.5 million homes and Government should make the changes it has announced today but the latest changes don’t go far enough. In order to build them, Government needs to be much bolder.
This is because we have under-built for a very long time. London hasn’t built 80,000 homes in any year since the Second World War.
The planning system is the main obstacle to meeting these targets. The discretionary nature of planning means a planning application can be rejected even though it meets all of the rules and complies with its area’s local plan.
This oddity of the United Kingdom’s planning system is the big reason why housebuilding dropped off across the country after the 1940s and why we now face big housing shortages in London and other big cities.
Then, with the introduction of vast areas of green belt around London and other large cities since the 1950s – explicitly designed to contain the growth of cities – housebuilding has been constrained even further.
Take into account the slow pace at which the UK has built new housing compared to Europe since the 1940s – when the UK switched to its discretionary planning system – and the true size of the housing shortage in the UK is 4.3 million, concentrated in London and other big cities.
So, as long as we continue with the current planning system, we won’t build enough houses. Centre for Cities estimates that by 2029, Greater London will fall short of its share of the 1.5 million housebuilding target by 60 per cent – roughly 196,000 homes.
In total, across the country, even if every part of the country met its highest rate of housebuilding under the current system, it would only reach 1.12 million homes, and that’s assuming every area equals its post-war peak following today’s reforms to planning.
Reform of national planning policy needs to be much more radical. Big cities like London will miss their housebuilding targets by the biggest margins – far from being able to compensate for shortfalls in the suburbs – so Government should replace the discretionary planning system with a zoning system for urban areas.
A zoning system removes the discretionary element and introduces clear – but flexible – rules about what can be built and where. This could pave the way for cities to become much denser and more public transport-oriented.
Given the entire role of green belt is to restrict development in cities, it is inevitable some areas of green belt will need to be developed. The green belt includes space within walking distance of train stations on key commuter routes into London – places like Orpington in Kent or Salfords in Surrey – that provide suitable places for suburban living.
This doesn’t need to eliminate the green belt. In total, across all places with the potential for development, a half-hour commute away from central London, there is room for 1.4 million homes. This shrinks the total green belt area in and around London by just 7 per cent.
The reason to do green belt reform is that we can’t rely on brownfield – or even ‘grey belt’ – development alone to reach 1.5 million homes this parliament.
The country has had a brownfield first policy for 30 years, and – as a result – the easiest and best locations have already been developed, and we have still not reached our housebuilding targets in the capital.
The remaining brownfield sites are typically former industrial sites that require demolition and expensive treatment to remove waste and toxins before homes can be built.
Government should provide the investment for a large public housebuilding programme in London and other big cities to make these locations suitable for housebuilding sooner rather than later.
The Government has high hopes to grow the economy and this won’t transpire unless more homes are built in and around London and the biggest cities elsewhere in the UK – the productivity engines of the country where jobs and cutting-edge businesses are predominantly found.
But the country needs a planning system that goes on meeting its changing needs as the economy grows. The current system throttles big cities like London. We know we need 1.5 million homes – for this, we need to put in place a system that will deliver them.
Andrew Carter is Chief Executive of Centre for Cities.
