Image source, Getty Images
- Author, Paul Seddon
- Role, Political journalist
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Angela Rayner has unveiled a sweeping overhaul of England’s planning rules to help deliver Labour’s promise to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029.
The Housing Secretary has said local housing targets, watered down by the Conservatives in 2022, will become mandatory again.
She also outlined plans to make it easier to build on low-quality green belt land that will be reclassified as “grey belt”.
Ms Rayner admitted her plans “will not be without controversy” but that changes were needed to make housing more affordable.
But the Conservatives have criticised the plans, saying they would force suburban areas to take more housing from Labour’s urban areas.
Under the plans, English councils will once again have to incorporate government housing targets into their long-term land allocation plans.
Councils that had not done so previously have seen their power to block new projects reduced.
Speaking in the House of Commons, Ms Rayner cited this as an example of how the Conservatives are “caving to anti-growth backbenchers” and putting “party before country”.
She added that new housing starts were likely to fall below 200,000 this year, well below the previous government’s overall target of 300,000.
Recalculated objectives
Labour also plans to change the way the targets are calculated, including dropping the 35% “top-up” for larger urban areas introduced by the Conservatives and changing the way the formula takes into account housing affordability.
Official documents show the changes mean councils will now have to provide around 370,000 homes a year, up from the current 305,000.
But some urban areas previously covered by the increase, which are largely Labour-run, will see their targets reduced.
The annual quota for London, where the increase currently applies to each individual borough, is expected to fall from just under 99,000 households to around 80,000.
Birmingham’s target is set to drop from 7,174 to 4,974, and Coventry’s will fall from 3,081 to 1,527.
Some of those councils have already complained that the price rise targets are unrealistic. Ms Rayner said the London figure would still be a “huge ask” and the previous target was “absolute nonsense”.
She admitted some of the new targets would be “surprising” – but argued the old system had produced “strange results”.
However, the changes were criticised by Housing Secretary and Conservative leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch, who said they would lead to more uncertainty.
She also argued it could force suburban and rural areas to take housing from Labor-controlled inner-city areas.
“Grey Belt”
Elsewhere, the government has given more details of its plan to make it easier to build on parts of the green belt, the protected land that surrounds major cities.
She suggested that councils with green belt areas should review their boundaries if they cannot meet housing needs “by other means”.
New guidelines will say councils should consider reclassifying previously developed land, or land that makes only a “limited contribution” to objectives such as protecting the countryside and the special character of historic towns, as “grey belt”.
Officials said they could not say how much of the green belt, which covers 12% of England’s land area, would be reclassified, with the final amount depending on choices made by local authorities.
Development in grey areas will be subject to new “golden rules”, including on the proportion of new housing classified as affordable.
Labour is also considering dropping a requirement that new homes be attractive, arguing that the requirement was too vague and had been interpreted differently in different regions.
The Greens called the planning shake-up “a distraction from Labour’s failure to take action and fund real responses to the housing crisis, including large-scale investment in genuinely affordable and sustainable social housing”.
