So there is no long-term strategic plan to solve the housing crisis, nor will there be one, according to Brandon Lewis MP, minister for housing and planning, in his recent interview for The Sunday Times.
The pace of change in the housing environment has accelerated once again since the May elections. The detail of this autumn’s Housing Bill is eagerly anticipated, with its raft of initiatives including the finer detail on starter homes and their inter-relationship with affordable housing and the Welfare Reform and Work Bill already on the move through parliament.
These are both very significant bodies of work, which will have substantial impacts on housing delivery, tenure of delivery and the health, wealth and wellbeing of our communities. Call me an optimist, but I really had hoped it was part of a bigger plan - one where we could take comfort in the fact that each initiative was not just an individual measure, but rather a crucial, sometimes painful step, in a bigger and more impactful plan.
I, along with many others, welcome the planning reform measures introduced since 2010 and, by and large, believe them to have had a meaningful, measurable and beneficial impact on housing delivery. The conclusion must then be that each of these reforms and those anticipated are not part of a longer-term plan, but merely a collection of related changes. Is this not inevitable, when major national issues, such as solving the housing crisis, are locked into parliamentary cycles?
I paused too, on reading the minister’s apparent lack of sympathy with councils “whinging” over lack of resources. It is of more than passing concern that at a time of seeking to increase housing supply, with a variety of positive delivery initiatives, that the conduit through which all such housing supply must pass - regulatory planning - has observably suffered and continues to suffer deep cuts. In March, the Institute of Fiscal Studies published a report that showed planning and development service expenditure was cut to less than half its 2009-10 level, having a devastating impact on morale and quality of service. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that the same study shows that, despite significantly falling revenues, on average councils spent less than they received from local government grants, increasing, rather than drawing from, their reserves.
But whether real or self-imposed, a lack of local authority planning resources remains a major barrier to increasing the efficiency of the planning system and thereby increasing housing supply. It doesn’t take much observation to see that, despite many committed individuals, local government planning departments now have few surviving specialist advisers, and that this and slashed continuing professional development budgets mean we are left with demotivated and significantly diminished teams.
The answer is not, in my view, one of increased planning fees, because as they are not ringfenced, any increases seem likely to be diverted elsewhere. Unless there is a marked and sustained improvement in the planning service delivered, fee increases are likely to be resisted by the development sector.
We must then rest in the hope that government and local authorities will recognise the importance of planning in delivering economic growth and housing, and voluntarily make the necessary resources available. There is now, if it did not exist before, every incentive for them to do so, in the form of government-proposed intervention where councils fail to produce a plan by early 2017 - in the absence of other inducements to prioritise, we must hope this will be the step-change needed to reverse the trend.
Jennie Daly is UK land director at Taylor Wimpey
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