The Home Builders Federation’s (HBF) policy and external affairs manager, Laura Markus, discusses what the next government should do to tackle the housing crisis.

Ahead of the General Election, HBF recently published our blueprint for the next government, setting out five key areas that need swift action if we are to work towards resolving the housing crisis.

At the heart of our approach are measures to fix the planning system. Despite huge increases in housing supply throughout the 2010s, the planning system has been a barrier for builders throughout, due to years of under-funding and under-resourcing of local planning departments. At a local level, the actual process of taking a site through the planning process has never been more costly, risky or complex. Delays and uncertainty in planning timescales and decision-making is the single biggest reason why small and medium enterprise (SME) home builders struggle.

While numerous governments have attempted to resolve these problems through sweeping reforms to the overarching system, HBF has long advocated for action to fix the planning process to improve efficiency, speed and predictability of the machine. This would prove less contentious while improving the business environment for both builders and local authorities.

The same concerns were raised recently by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in its Market Study of the home building industry. The CMA’s final report concluded that the complex and unpredictable planning system is responsible for the persistent under-delivery of new homes. The report also highlighted that many planning departments are under-resourced and are required to consult with a wide range of statutory stakeholders who often hold up projects by submitting holding responses or late feedback to consultations on proposed developments.

In this area, we are calling on the next government to:

• Reduce planning delays by putting planning services on a self-sustaining footing and ringfencing planning application fees for planning purposes.
• Take the politics out of housing by establishing a fixed national scheme of delegation (introducing a higher threshold for reserved matters submissions to be determined by committee).
• Rationalise the list of statutory consultees, seek greater involvement from them in the scoping of planning application material and ensure effective monitoring and enforcement of deadlines for their responses.
• Accelerate the implementation of National Development Management Policies to help speed up local plan making.
• Reform S106/CIL by ensuring wider use of standard template agreements as a basis for negotiation to ensure consistency across the country and mitigate delays.
• Support SME developers by introducing a presumption in favour of development on small sites, up to 25 homes, on brownfield land.

And the issues in the planning system have been exacerbated over the last two years due to the introduction of anti-development proposals from Westminster, namely the removal of mandatory housing targets in 2023. The CMA’s report also concluded that many local planning authorities (LPAs) don’t have clear targets or strong incentives to deliver the numbers of homes needed in their area. To ensure that the country is planning for enough new homes, we are calling on the government to:

• Reverse the December 2023 changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, with a particular focus on reinstating mandatory housing targets and the Five-Year Housing Land Supply.
• Reform the Standard Method of Housing Need so that the existing housing stock of an area is used as a baseline, rather than household projections.
• Review the Green Belt and identify areas of poor ecological value, including brownfield sites, to support the development of high quality, energy efficient new housing.
• Incentivise LPAs to have an up-to-date Local Plan in place by ensuring only areas with a current plan will be in receipt of infrastructure (or equivalent) funding.
• Encourage more devolution deals that confer statutory and mandatory spatial plan-making powers.

While issues associated with the planning system are undoubtedly the biggest barriers to increasing housing supply, these cannot work in isolation. HBF is also calling for action to increase home ownership, to unblock homes held up by nutrient neutrality requirements and to support green jobs and infrastructure.

Housing is one of the top priorities facing voters at the election. Any incoming government must work with the industry and local authorities in combination to ensure that both sides are able to deliver the housing we need and resolve our ever-deepening housing crisis.

House building, and planning in particular, has historically performed best when governments have sought to engage, cooperate and support those actually involved in delivering the homes. I hope that, post-election, we will see a national government that is once again committed to this.

To find out more about what local government stakeholders want from the next government, check out the rest of our NextGov series.