Dame Rebecca Harris, Member of Parliament for Castle Point, is deeply concerned about the impact the Labour Government’s Proposed National Planning Policy Reforms and will be scrutinising in detail any proposals that are brought forward to ensure we protect our precious Green Belt.
"Inflating the housing targets in Whitehall will simply see more planners colour in more parts of more maps in town halls. We have seen again and again it does not lead to more houses being built at the speed required to meet demand.
In 2021, it was found that 1.1 million homes that had been granted planning permission in the previous decade were yet to be built. In 2023, it was found that the largest ten publicly listed national housebuilders were sitting on 700,000 housing plots.
The problem is not that so-called 'NIMBY' councils are failing to designate enough land for housing, it’s that big unit developers are being enabled, through being given huge security of supply, to build at a rate that best serves their share price as opposed to serving local housing need. It’s a problem of local monopoly, not local democracy.
Inflating housing targets and the relaxation of Green Belt protections puts pressure on councils to allocate large Green Belt sites in single ownership for development, rather than concentrate on areas in need of more complex regeneration on previously developed land.
Sites chosen for development in local plans have to be ‘deliverable’. In many instances, the ‘deliverability’ of a site is not proven by meeting a threshold, but if it is argued it is more deliverable than other sites in competition. In these instances, large virgin fields in single ownership, or subject to development options, nearly always win in the deliverability argument over collections of smaller brownfield sites. Particularly as big unit developers can outspend smaller local developers on consultants and lawyers to argue their case and claim that they can get their ‘vehicles on there tomorrow’. This is despite the fact that in practice green field sites bolted onto urban peripheries tend to deliver homes to market at a slower rate than smaller brownfield sites.
These proposed reforms will simply further serve the business model of the big unit developers that have been failing to build the houses we need for decades, as they are granted more and more larger permissions and so are better able to manipulate new supply in local housing markets. We have seen over the past 30 years that when planning permission for large green field sites is granted to single big unit developers, or forced by the judgement of a planning appeal, they only build at the rate that they can get the best local market return by ensuring scarcity (often no more than 20/30 a year in a given market area).
The less certainty big developers have about where their future profits are coming from, the more they will have to build homes to realise profits in the here and now, which is why it’s important the Government doesn't force local councils to give them ‘fifteen years’ of enormous guaranteed supply.
When I was in business if you told me where all my sales were coming from for the next fifteen years, I wouldn’t have rushed around getting every last sale I could that day. With big unit developers, it’s the same principle. Small local builders build out sites as quickly as they can because they tend to buy sites outright, meaning every day it is not developed they are losing money on it. Arguably we would be better served by having shorter plans, or simply a five or six-year rolling supply requirement, unless local authorities are working together to realise a garden settlement-style solution to their housing need.
The Government should look to reform planning law to favour sites that are likely to be built quickly. These are smaller often brownfield sites promoted by local developers, brownfield sites in urban centres with good transport links that can achieve high density, and new towns or garden villages that bind landowners, developers and local authorities to legal timetables and formal frameworks for delivery.
I also believe that the Government should abolish the provisions in the law that allow developments to be won on appeal without Section 106 agreements being applied. No significant development should be built out without proportional infrastructure improvements, regardless of how they achieve permission. As it stands, sites that councils have seen fit to spend money to oppose are likely to be the sites that will put the most strain on local social or physical infrastructure.
The proposed reforms will be resisted by many local authorities. Opposition from concerned local residents and constraints from overstretched infrastructure means more and more local taxpayers' money will spent on consultancy and legal fees for plan examinations and planning appeals, and not on local council services. We are more likely to see a boom in the trade of legal services than we are from house building, as a result of inflated housing targets. Ironically enough, the areas that have the best transport infrastructure and the least local opposition to development are exactly areas that are subject to the urban uplift for housing that these proposals are going to remove.
I believe the vagueness around the definition of ‘Grey Belt’ in the planned reform will add to the problem. If the Government are going to look to the Green Belt for development, I very much agree that previously developed land or land of little amenity or environmental value should be the only Green Belt land considered. However, defining it as land that makes a ‘limited contribution’ to the purposes of Green Belt, SSSI sites and other classifications aside, means that it will be left to the courts to make the actual definition through rulings at planning appeals - planning appeals where big unit developers will have the most expensive lawyers.
Every Green Belt site meets at least two of the planned objectives of Green Belt by the nature of their existence, preventing urban sprawl and encouraging the regeneration of the existing urban area, but how far Green Belt meets the other objectives of Green Belt is something that is already frequently tested at planning appeals up and down the country. At best, this definition of ‘Grey Belt’ will change very little and planning appeals that would happen anyway would focus on the same points under a different label. However, at worst it could see a huge increase in challenges, until a firmer definition is established, and further immense strain on very pressured local planning departments.
Ironically these reforms, proposed by a Labour Government, are only likely to reinforce the business model of the big unit developers that has failed to deliver the housing we need for decades. The problem isn’t local councils not giving permission for enough houses, it's that the system allows big unit developers to grow their balance sheet without delivering the housing the country needs."