Quick Note: All The Recent Government Announcements

I couldn’t find a list of every recent government publication on planning in one place, so here it is:

• Speech: The Deputy Prime Minister’s statement to the House of Commons (July 30, 2024)

• Press release: Our plan to build more homes (July 30, 2024)

• Press release: Housing targets increased to get Britain building again (July 30, 2024)

• Proposed reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework and other changes to the planning system consultation (July 30, 2024), made up of:

  • the consultation document ;

  • the draft text for the proposed new NPPF;

  • the outcome of the proposed revised method for calculating housing targets.

• Press release: Expert taskforce to spearhead a new generation of new towns  (July 31, 2024)

• Press release: Significant measures to tackle worsening backlog in local audit (July 31, 2024)

• Policy statement on new towns (July 31, 2024)

• Letter from the Deputy Prime Minister to local authorities: Playing your part in building the homes we need (July 31, 2024)

• Letter from the Deputy Prime Minister to Metro Mayors: Playing your part in building the homes we need (July 31, 2024)

• Letter from the Housing Minister to stakeholders: Building the homes we need (July 31, 2024)

• Local Plan examinations: letter to the Chief Executive of the Planning Inspectorate (July 31, 2024)

• And the Chief Executive’s response  (August 1, 2024)

• Letter from the Housing Minister to Lindsey Richards, President of the Royal Town Planning Institute (August 2, 2024)

Taken together, these documents give us the following announcements:

• Mandatory housing targets for local authorities reintroduced

• New method for calculating local housing needs

• Green Belt land to be reviewed for potential housing development

• Introduction of "grey belt" category for prioritised development

• Plans for new towns

• Easier process for building infrastructure and renewable energy projects

• £450 million funding for social housing

• Review of Right to Buy scheme

• Increase in planning application fees

• New Planning and Infrastructure Bill to be introduced

• Long-term housing strategy to be published

• Measures to address local authority audit backlog

I don’t want to piss on anybody’s bonfire, but these announcements seem to point towards ‘more of the same, but a little more tilted in the direction of development’, which I suppose is, on the margin, a good thing. But it is, so far, not the radical overhaul of the planning system that we almost certainly need. Trust and predictability is what the new government are going for – as with the Treasury, so with MHCLG – and that means fewer structural changes and more adjustments within the system.

That being said, there is a lot of good stuff here, as well as some not-so-good stuff. I am putting the finishing touches on parts 2 and 3 of my series on housing targets; the latter piece will look at Labour’s proposed changes here. There have been quite a few criticisms of the new targets formula, including this excellent piece by Tim Leunig (see Sam Bowman’s summary). The government have responded fairly directly to these sorts of criticisms, which is a good thing, but I agree with the critics. They don’t address the core problem with how we set housing targets, something I will talk about in Part 2: these targets are not demand-led. And while they are not demand-led, they are unlikely to build enough houses in the places we need them.

We don’t know what the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will contain, but last year’s Levelling Up and Regeneration Act gives the current government a lot of levers already. I can only hope that this current list of changes is the opening salvo, and we will see more aggressive legislative changes to things like environmental assessments, and more aggressive ministerial action on the things they can already control but choose not to.