The Government has announced a new raft of proposals to increase housebuilding as it tries to meet its promise of building 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s.
Michael Gove told an audience in London on Monday the Government is on track to deliver one million new homes during the current Parliament and put forward a series of proposals to tackle the UK’s housing crisis.
Below, the PA news agency looks at the key questions surrounding the housing crisis and the latest proposals.
– How bad is the housing crisis?
It is difficult to measure the full scale of the UK’s housing crisis but most measures suggest it is severe.
A 2019 study by Heriot-Watt University suggested England alone needed to build 340,000 houses per year, including 145,000 affordable homes, to meet the backlog, while the Centre for Cities think tank suggested the UK is missing four million homes.
While the Government has committed to building 300,000 homes a year, it is missing its target, with 233,000 homes completed in 2021/22.
The official waiting list for social housing remains at about 1.2 million households, while an investigation by The Independent found two-thirds of local authorities failed to build a single council house in 2021/22.
The shortfalls mean tenants are often forced into sub-standard housing, while increases in private rents have accelerated since the Covid pandemic.
According to estate agent Hamptons, private rents for new tenancies rose by 11.1% in the last financial year, while rents in desirable areas rose even faster. In London, rents rose by almost 17.2% and averaged £2,210 per month.
– What is the Government proposing?
The Government’s latest announcement on the housing crisis contains a raft of proposals designed to boost the number of new homes.
One is for a review of “permitted development rights” to allow shops and takeaways to be converted into homes without the need for planning permission. Such rights already exist for some properties, such as office blocks, with conversions accounting for 22,770 new homes in 2021/22.
The other main prong of the announcement is a focus on brownfield sites and “urban areas” rather than “concreting over the countryside”, with a new “urban quarter” in Cambridge set to be the first area to benefit from a new “super squad” of planners working on clearing obstacles to major housing developments.
The exact location of this new development – with homes, laboratories and green spaces – is not clear, but similar plans were unveiled earlier this year for Cambridge City Airport, which was taken out of the green belt in 2006.
Other proposals announced by Housing Secretary Michael Gove include a £24 million fund for training in the skills needed to increase housebuilding, and an Office for Place to lead a “design revolution”, following on from his promise of ensuring new homes are “beautiful” and designed alongside local communities.
– Will it work?
Commentators are sceptical as to whether the Government’s latest proposals will do much to solve the housing crisis, with several pointing to the decision to scrap housebuilding targets at the end of last year as a key problem.
Property consultancy Knight Frank’s head of planning, Stuart Baillie, said plans to expand permitted development rights are “unlikely to have meaningful impact on housing supply”, resulting in hundreds rather than thousands of new homes.
Similar conversions have also been criticised for providing poor quality housing, with the Town and Country Planning Association telling MPs they represented “the worst face of the current UK housing crisis”.
Plans for a focus on brownfield site are also likely to run into trouble.
The “brownfield first” approach has effectively been planning policy for years and successive governments have made similar commitments to “focus on brownfield” before.
Under Liz Truss, then-housing secretary Sir Simon Clarke told the Conservative Party conference in 2022 he would speed up brownfield development, Boris Johnson told the Commons he was committed to “brownfield first” in 2020, and David Cameron pledged in 2011 to release huge swathes of brownfield land for housebuilding.
But brownfield development is often more expensive than building on green fields, with the sites presenting challenges such as contaminants, and proposals often meet local opposition anyway.
Within hours of the latest announcement, South Cambridgeshire MP Anthony Browne had already declared his opposition to “the Government’s nonsense plans to impose mass housebuilding on Cambridge”.
Such opposition is often motivated by concern about the impact on local resources, with Mr Brown saying the area has “quite literally run out of water”.Some greenfield development will also be needed in any case, with estimates suggesting there is only space on brownfield sites for just over one million homes.
But others are more optimistic. Victoria Hills, chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute, said the plans would “make a significant contribution to alleviating the pressure placed on England’s planning services” while Ryan Shorthouse of centre-right think tank Bright Blue said they were “strong steps towards achieving greater and greener homes” more would be needed.
