Letwin’s final report offers ‘golden opportunity’

CPRE believes that we should prioritise development on brownfield sites. But across the country, developments are being approved on large greenfield sites, usually on the edge of towns and cities.

We support the ambition to improve the mix of homes on all large sites, especially increased provision by local authorities and registered providers of affordable and specialist housing.

We hope that the review will recommend a strengthening of national planning policy.

The mix of homes permitted on large sites should be dictated by planning policies seeking to meet locally identified needs for affordable and social housing.

In the absence of an up-to-date local plan, there should be stronger expectations of a mix of tenures and sizes.

Local authorities must be given stronger powers to compel developers to build out sites with planning permission.

CPRE’s own analysis found that the largest house builders increased the amount of land with planning permission they held by 20% between 2006 and 2016, but built 13% fewer homes over the same period.

The review should recommend strong ‘use it or lose it’ measures for large house builders. This would enable local authorities to compulsorily purchase sites where buildout is not progressing quickly enough according to an agreed timetable and bring in another builder to finish the job.

“The review should recommend strong ‘use it or lose it’ measures for large house builders”

In addition to diversity in the housebuilding sector, we must also address the broken land market that underpins the industry.

Developers can bid up the price of land to eye-watering levels and still make healthy profits by squeezing design standards and their provision of affordable housing.

Reforms of compulsory purchase are needed to address this fundamental problem.

These might range from incremental changes to make it easier for local authorities to acquire sites to truly transformative reforms of compensation rules to exclude ‘hope value’ from the price paid for land.

“Dramatically shifting how government spending on housing is allocated could also play a crucial role in improving diversity in housebuilding”

Dramatically shifting how government spending on housing is allocated could also play a crucial role in improving diversity in housebuilding.

Redirecting the 2017 Budget’s projected housing spend of £44bn away from stoking demand and towards increasing supply would enable this without additional funding.

Here, we have two options.

The first is to redirect money currently allocated to schemes such as Help to Buy into Homes England’s Affordable Homes Programme.

This could help the programme provide more homes for social rent, affordable rent and low-cost home ownership – all would add to the mix of homes and help speed up delivery.

Delivering more homes through Homes England would also provide more guarantees of high housing design standards, as it is more committed to these than some private house builders.

The second is to amend the model for how the New Homes Bonus is paid, to encourage local authorities to grant permission to well-planned developments that have a diverse range of types and tenures, rather than just ‘executive homes’ that fall within high council-tax bands.

As long as developers continue to focus on building larger and more expensive houses slowly enough to keep the prices high, we will continue to sacrifice countryside needlessly.

We need to do more to provide the truly affordable homes we need.

Sir Oliver Letwin’s report offers a golden opportunity for government to show that it is serious about tackling the housing crisis.