Councils have granted enough planning consents to meet the government’s target of one million new homes by 2020, but developers are failing to build on them, new research has revealed.
New analysis from Civitas has disproved the point that the planning process is undermining efforts to increase the supply of new homes.
It shows that the number of homes approved for development has far exceeded the number of starts every year for the past decade.
An average of 204,000 new homes have been granted planning permissions between 2006 and 2015 but only 126,000 homes a year have been started on over this period.
The analysis shows that last year had the biggest deficit with 261,644 homes permitted for development but only 139,680 recorded starts.
Daniel Bentley, editorial director of Civitas, said: ‘Local authority planning departments have been under enormous pressure in recent years and are frequently blamed by developers for holding up housebuilding.
‘But what these figures show is that councils are issuing planning permissions in greater numbers than at any time for at least a decade. The bigger problem, and what lies at the root of our housing shortage, is that landowners and developers are not getting approved sites built out quickly enough.
'The answer to this must lie in changing the incentives for landowners and developers, including the imposition of contractual obligations that ensure residential development proceeds within a certain timeframe.
‘This in turn will mean giving local authorities much greater bargaining power in negotiations with builders over new developments.’
