Govt confirms mandatory housing targets & NPPF update

Yesterday in Parliament, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner outlined how the new Government was going to ‘Get Britain Building’ and announced the start of an eight-week consultation on an updated NPPF.

Key points from her statement include:

  • The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government will make local housing targets mandatory and standardise the local housing need method, requiring local authorities to ‘plan for homes proportionate to the size of existing communities’.
  • A comprehensive spreadsheet has been released outlining how local authority housing numbers would change under this new method, with the overall national housing target rising from 300,000 to just over 370,000 per year.
  • Local authorities will be expected to review and release Green Belt if it cannot meet its identified housing need through other means.
  • The new land category of ‘Grey Belt’ is introduced, defined as ‘land in the Green Belt comprising Previously Developed Land and any other parcels and / or areas of Green Belt land that make a limited contribution to the five Green Belt purposes’.
  • Developments on Green Belt land will be subject to the government’s ‘Golden Rules’ including 50% affordable housing.
  • The previous Government’s ‘urban uplift’ rules are to be scrapped, dropping London’s housing target from 100,000 to 80,000 homes a year.
  • The requirement for new homes to be ‘beautiful’ is to be scrapped.
  • There will be a ‘council house revolution’ which would see social housing numbers rising in 2025 / 2026 and include Government funding to councils and housing associations.
  • The Government will make it easier to build laboratories, digital infrastructure and gigafactories.
  • The Government’s forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill will include measures to speed up the delivery of high-quality homes and infrastructure.
  • The Government will announce soon how they ‘intend to deliver on [their] commitment to build a new generation of new towns’.

The draft NPPF update and the spreadsheet of local authority housing targets under the new method can be found here.

 

Author: Edward Poynton

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