The Government is “absolutely willing” to step in and take over plans from local authorities that refuse to comply with new housebuilding targets.
A shake-up of planning rules will see councils given mandatory targets to deliver a total of 370,000 homes a year in England.
Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook has urged local councils to “exhaust all your options” to meet the goal, including releasing the “right parts” of protected greenbelt land.
Local authorities will get Government support to put plans in place, he said, but “recalcitrant authorities” that refuse to comply and put plans in place to meet targets could face the “full range of ministerial intervention power”, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
He added: “There is a series of escalating steps we can take bearing down on performance.
“But in extremis, I want to be very clear about this, the Government can take a local plan off a local authority that is resisting putting one in place, and we are absolutely willing to do it, if we have evidence that individual local planning authorities are refusing to comply.
“Refusing to allow their communities, their residents, to shape development in the way that best suits them in a given area – we are willing to step in if that happens.”
The Prime Minister and his deputy Angela Rayner have pledged to build 1.5 million homes and take decisions on 150 major infrastructure projects this parliament.
The updated national planning policy framework (NPPF) will commit to a “brownfield first” strategy, with disused sites that have already been developed in the past prioritised for new building.
The default answer when a developer seeks to build on brownfield sites will be “yes”.
But councils will also be ordered to review their greenbelt boundaries to meet targets by identifying lower quality “greybelt” land that could be built on.
The updated NPPF will define greybelt land for the first time.
The definition of grey belt put forward by the Government is “land making a limited contribution to the green belt’s purposes”, Mr Pennycook told Times Radio.
“So we are talking about poorly performing land. It will include previously developed land, you know, like disused petrol stations, abandoned car parks, but also just low-value scrub land,” he said.
He acknowledged the targets were a stretch in many parts of the country.
“What I say to local authority leaders is just ‘exhaust all your options to meet those targets’, whether that be bringing forward brownfield, previously developed land, densifying that land, looking to release, say, poor quality grey belt land within the green belt – if you have any – through green belt reviews.”
He told Radio 4 that Labour was seeking a “smarter and more strategic way” to look at greenbelt release.
He said: “It happens very often. It’s happened for the past 14 years but in a haphazard way… we want a smarter and more strategic way to release the right parts of the green belt where that is required to meet local housing need.”
Any development on greenbelt land must comply with new “golden rules”, which require developers to provide infrastructure for local communities, such as nurseries, GP surgeries and transport, as well as a higher level of social and affordable housing.
Shadow housing minister Kevin Hollinrake said that Labour’s housing plans would amount to “bulldozing” greenbelt sites.
He told Sky News: “We’re not against building more homes. So we agree with those parts of the plan.
“What we disagree with is bulldozing greenfield, greenbelt sites. That’s what we’ll see. We’ll see many of these homes delivered in rural areas, yet a lowering of targets in urban areas, particularly London.”
Local planning committees will be “swept aside” under Labour’s plans, he added.
“We’ve seen Labour now taking that right away. So there’s planning committees, the people you elect in your local area to be able to make sure that planning that those homes go in the right place, completely swept aside.
“The decisions are effectively made by central government, by planning officers, by inspectors, so all that democratic accountability will have been swept away. And the bulldozers will simply go in piling, without you being able to say anything about it.”
Under the current planning framework, just under one-third of local authorities have adopted a local plan – a document setting out where future homes and infrastructure could be built – within the last five years.
The Government announced £100 million of additional cash for councils, along with 300 additional planning officers, to speed up decision-making processes.
The extra money can be used to hire more staff or consultants and to carry out technical studies and site assessments.
The NPPF reforms are just one element of the Government’s plans to rewrite the planning rules to make it easier to build homes and major infrastructure projects.
The forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill is intended to rip up red tape and make it faster for projects to be approved.
The Prime Minister last week promised to end the “nonsense” that allowed an “alliance of naysayers” to block projects or force up costs through environmental protections.
