The Government has introduced new plans to fix the “broken housing market” and build more homes across England. The plans include the creation of a new £3 billion Home Building Fund.
Communities Secretary Sajid Javid says the current system isn’t working and is one of the greatest barriers to progress in Britain today.
The reforms are contained in a white paper which sets out new measures which are designed to ensure the housing market works for everyone, including people on lower incomes, renters, disabled and older people by getting the right homes built in the right places and by consulting on the principle of a new, standardised way of calculating housing demand to reflect current and future housing pressures. Every local area will need to produce a realistic plan and review it at least every 5 years.
Currently 40% of local planning authorities do not have an up to date plan that meets the projected growth in households in their area. Fixing this will help make sure enough land is released for new homes to be built in the parts of the country where people want to live and work and ensure developments take heed of local people’s wishes, while continuing with maximum protections for the green belt.
Councils and developers will also be expected to use land more efficiently by avoiding building homes at low density and building higher where there is a shortage of land and in locations well served by public transport such as train stations.
The Government will give local authorities the tools to speed up house building, as well as powers to make sure developers build homes on time. The Government will make it easier for councils to issue completion notices, shortening the timescales to require developers to start building within two years, rather than three, when planning permission is granted.
The Government will also require greater transparency and information from developers on their pace of delivery of new housing, so that councils can consider this when planning their local need. This will help address the serious and growing gap between the number of planning permissions granted and the number of new homes completed.
Action will be taken to help small independent builders enter the market. Currently around 60% of new homes are built by just 10 companies.
A new £3 billion Home Building Fund is intended to help build more than 25,000 new homes this Parliament and up to 225,000 in the longer term by providing loans to SME builders, custom builders, offsite construction and essential infrastructure, creating thousands of new jobs in the process.
