#Plan-ifestoes 2024: how many houses?
My fellow citizens. Friends. Countrymen. Lend me your ears. In the heat a general election campaign that you might charitably describe as… “painful”… finally… FINALLY we #planoraks have something to talk about. We have the manifestoes. Or, if you’ll forgive me, the #plan-ifestoes [Not sure that’ll catch on, Ed.].
Yes, all but one of these tomes of wisdom will be nigh-on worthless come mid-July, but in case you’re interested - here are some of the big ones:
Full of interesting nuggets. Too much to digest in a single post. So - if you’re game for a challenge, to take the various parties’ temperatures on planning, I thought we could do a whistle-stop tour on what these manifestoes have to tell us about one thing in particular. A perennial favourite. A national housing target.
Which parties are suggesting one? What target are they suggesting? Are their suggestions even vaguely credible?
Before we turn to the scores on the doors, a little history:
How many homes have we been building?
Our current national target of 300,000 homes a year started with Philip Hammond’s 2017 budget. Although the parentage of that target stretches back to Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, and it appeared in the Tory manifesto in 1951. So. How have we been getting on?
Naaaat so great.
You’ve all seen graphs like this one before, but here’s the headline:
The last time we cracked 300,000 in the UK was… 1977. 47 years ago. Another era - Mull of Kintyre picking up the gong for Christmas Number 1 and, a little more on point, a year when 145,000 homes of our overall total were delivered by local authorities themselves.
Now. A fair bit has changed since 1977. Paul McCartney may still be banging out the classics. But how many homes did local authorities deliver in the most recent monitoring year? Just over 4,000.
How many of those homes are affordable? Something in the order of 60,000 a year (so very broadly 1 in 3). In a good year:
Just under 1/2 of affordable homes are funded through section 106 agreements and delivered by housing associations. Most of the rest relies on grant funding e.g. from Homes England or the GLA.
Going forward, absent any radical political shake-ups or systemic reform, would we be expecting these headline numbers to go up? Or down?
Down. Big time.
That’s because houses need planning permissions. Planning permissions normally need local plans. And both the number of planning permissions and the number of local plans has been tumbling into the floor for years now:
The number of planning applications made and permissions granted is at it’s lowest ebb for 20+ years - even lower than during the dark days of a global pandemic that brought our system to its knees:
The number of local plans submitted to the Planning Inspectorate for examination last year was the lowest in 20 years+, and around a fifth of what it should have been (as I explained here):
So. Almost 50 years since we delivered 300,000 homes in a year. And all the current indicators suggest we’re in the middle a huge decline.
What then are the parties offering us?
Targets, my friends. Targets. Here we go…
The Lib Dems
Is there a target? Oh yes. A chunky one.
The Lib Dems want to deliver no fewer than… 380,000 homes a year (aka 1.9 million over the course of a 5-year Parliament). The last time we did that? 1968. 😬. It would mean more than doubling delivery from that we’ve seen in several of the last few years. You may remember this was shoved through by the young ‘uns over the staunch objections of the party leaders last year.
And as if that weren’t enough, the Lib Dems want that overall target to include 150,000 social homes a year. Now. They don’t define “social homes”. But even if we take a broader approach and include all affordable tenures, we’d be talking about increasing annual delivery by 2.5 times. NB at current rates, delivering 150,000 social homes would imply an even punchier overall target of at least 450,000 homes total.
Don’t get me wrong. That kind of step-change in affordable housing delivery is desperately needed. Of course it is. We all know that. But… how. How on earth do we more-than-double housing delivery?
Well, God bless ‘em, the Lib Dems don’t tell us.
The #plan-ifesto refers to “new garden cities and community-led development of cities and towns”. But that isn’t the title of a section on planning reform. That’s the full section. The whole shebang. What does it mean? Where do the new garden cities go? How are they brought forward? How long will it take? What about the land beyond cities or towns e.g. the Green Belt? What happens if the community who are supposed to be doing the “community-led development” don’t want any development? Not an idle question. Daisy Cooper MP - the Lib Dems deputy leader - doesn’t ever appear to have come across a local housing scheme she supports (see here, here, here… it goes on). She disliked an appeal decision I was involved in 2021 so much that last year she tried to change the law (NB unsuccessfully) to make it harder for housing schemes to come forward in the Green Belt.
This is, of course, the difficulty with the old “right homes in the right places” punchline. So often the “right” place is shorthand for “a place where somebody else lives”.
So. We can applaud the Lib Dems for aspiration. The numbers are eye-watering. But are the numbers backed up with a credible plan? Do they get points for realism? For pragmatism? For detail? For deliverability?
You tell me.
The Tories
Is there a target? You betcha.
Rishi is promising us… 1.6 million homes in England in the next Parliament. 320,000 a year. Just - it would seem - in England. Not the UK. Which would make that target even more challenging. And is, of course, waaayyyy in excess of anything we’ve delivered in this country for many, many decades.
So, come on then. How are we going to get to 1.6 million?
First thing - we’re going to retain our “cast-iron commitment to protect the Green Belt”. Well. That ought to do it.
Next - we abolish nutrient neutrality rules. These ones. But that only nabs us 100,000 homes. So what else?
Next - we raise density within cities, we unlock regeneration quarters via new development corporations in places like Leeds, Liverpool and York [All places with Labour MPs? Mmmmmm] and we, “fast-track” brownfield / previously developed sites. Put it all in the cities. More or less.
We have, of course, been trying to do exactly that for decades. As Lichfield have explained, building out all of our brownfield sites to capacity gets us only 1/3 of the homes we need, and areas with the lowest % of brownfield sites are the least affordable housing markets in the UK.
And you know what they say about our 20 largest cities. Colour-wise, I mean. Notice any trends?
Any detail on how the Tories intend to reform the planning system they’ve been stewarding since 2010 so as to increase house-building by 50%+ to levels we haven’t seen in half a century? Not really. Sorry pals. How will fast-tracking work for brownfield sites? I don’t know. How will Councils be forced to “set land aside” for SME builders? No idea. How will we “ensure more homes get built” without changing the approach to housing targets and local plans in the car-crash NPPF from December 2023?
Again… you tell me.
Reform
Any housing target? Nope.
We’re told the planning system needs… you guessed it… “reform”.
What kind of reform? Well the kind of reform which will “fast track new housing on brownfield sites and infrastructure projects to boost businesses, especially in the North and in coastal regeneration towns”.
That’s all she wrote, folks. That’s the full enchilada. What does this brownfield fast track look like? Any ideas? Anything at all? Where does Nigel stand on the most pressing issue of our time: 4 year housing land supply?!?!?!? TELL US NIGEL!
Nothing.
The Greens
Is there a target? There sure is.
150,000 new social homes a year. By - in part - increasing Council and Housing Association provision. And they’re talking - it would seem - about “social rent” housing. Not affordable housing more widely.
Again - do we need those sorts of numbers. Sure we do.
But let’s tell it like it is. In the most recent monitoring year, we completed 40,892 new affordable homes for rent in this country. So what the Greens are selling means an increase by a factor of over 3.5 times.
Given that, as I’ve said, almost 1/2 of affordable housing is funded by s.106 agreements, this kind of increase in social rented housing implies a gargantuan increase in private housing. We’re talking 500,000 a year plus.
Do the Greens get into how that’s going to work in real life? You already know the answer.
Labour
Now whatever you think of the reds, we can give them this: this #plan-ifesto has by far the most detail on proposals for planning reform. Compared to the others. By far. Several pages worth. With some sums to boot.
Is there a target? Of course there is. And get this - I think it’s the most modest target in any of the #plan-ifestoes so far. Compared to the above, Labour are “only” chasing 1.5 million homes in the next Parliament - 300,000 new homes a year.
Of course, that’s still very considerably more homes than we’ve delivered for decades. But, I suppose, the difficulty Labour have is that - should the polls be anywhere close to correct - they’re the only ones who might actually have to get on and meet these pledges.
How do we get to 1.5 million? Well, there’s a fair amount to cover. The plan is to:
“Immediately” reverse recent changes to the NPPF “including restoring mandatory housing targets”
“Take tough action” to ensure that authorities have up to date local plans;
“Reform and strengthen the presumption in favour of sustainable development”;
Funding additional planning officers (fewer than 1 per LPA, but still…)
Make “full use” of intervention powers where necessary to build the homes we need;
Take a brownfield first approach, but also take a “strategic” approach to Green Belt release - prioritising release of “lower quality ‘grey belt’ land”… whatever that is;
Deliver “a generation of new towns”, urban extensions and regeneration projects;
Strengthen planning obligations on affordable homes and supporting “councils and housing associations to build their capacity and make a greater contribution to affordable housing supply”
Require cross-boundary strategic planning in combined and mayoral authorities, and devolve more planning powers.
Obbbbbviousssssly (a) most of this we’d heard about already, and (b) details are still to come. Well. That’s the way manifestoes seem to work. Still. I’ll give this much to Labour: at least they’re talking about the things that actually matter. Plan-making. Resourcing. The NPPF. Strategic planning. Green belt review. Building capacity of Councils and housing associations to build more homes themselves. Some of these fixes (e.g. new towns) will take years. But others (e.g. the NPPF) can be fixed in days. Either way, these are exactly the themes that have kept this blog going for the last few years. They are asking some of the right questions.
But but but. What about the answers. Is it going to work? Is 1.5 million homes in the first Parliament really deliverable given the abject mess we’re in today? As ever - I’ve no idea. Given the downward spirals in planning permissions and new local plans, getting anywhere close to 1.5 million homes in the next 5 years would be little short of a miracle. But heck. You know. Miracles happen sometimes.
And you know what they say - when it comes to planning anyway - things can only get better.
Enjoy the drama, #planoraks. I hope you’re well. Don’t forget to vote - as if you would. And, in all this madness, do your level best to take a deep breath, keep calm, carry on and #keeponplanning.
