Plan for change

Each year, The Housing Forum working groups select areas of particular relevance to the future of housing. In the general election, housing hardly gained a mention. The ‘big idea’ was localism. Although dismissed by the housing industry as a ‘NIMBY charter’, The Housing Forum decided to make it the focus of a working group.

Our conclusion is that localism could contribute to the creation of more homes and better places, but only if certain pre-conditions are met. We set these out in a seven-point plan in our recent report Plan and deliver - a response to the localism agenda.

We call for a change of mindset at a local level through which communities and planners develop a shared and positive vision for the kind of places they want to create. This contrasts starkly with the present backward-looking and dreary world of ‘meeting needs’ and development control that persists, despite six years of spatial planning.

We, therefore, believe it would be counterproductive to throw away the spatial planning reforms. We just need to make them work properly and, in particular, to use sustainability appraisals to determine where housing should and should not be built. This would reduce the current costly and confrontational process of putting forward unsuitable and unsustainable sites to be countered in lengthy legal processes and the wasteful use of skills and public resources.

Once sites have been identified and permissions granted, we believe there should be an obligation to develop, as not to do so would put at risk the desired outcomes of the spatial plan. Planning authorities should be able to intervene if local well-being is threatened by non-delivery.

To deliver these new places will require the growth of new markets in public and private infrastructure finance. These new models must ensure that development follows infrastructure and not the other way round. For too long, lack of infrastructure has been used as an excuse to reject new development.

New, locally accountable delivery vehicles may be needed to ensure that agreed local visions are realised. There are good historical examples, both public and private, such as the garden cities, new towns or co-ownership schemes which have stood the test of time.

Finally, we need to target landowners with a range of positive and negative incentives directed at stimulating growth and long-term investment.

Localism must not be interpreted as the exclusive right of existing communities to block development needed for our common future, but as a new deal between central and local government and communities to share responsibility for making sustainable development happen.

Barry Munday is chair of The Housing Forum