Angela Rayner units new housing targets in planning overhaul

Angela Rayner has unveiled an overhaul of England’s planning guidelines to assist ship Labour’s promise of 1.5m new properties by 2029.

The housing secretary stated native housing targets, watered down by the Conservatives in 2022, would develop into obligatory once more.

She additionally laid out plans to make it simpler to construct on low-quality inexperienced belt land that will likely be reclassified as “gray belt”.

Ms Rayner admitted her plans “received’t be with out controversy” however modifications have been required to make housing extra reasonably priced.

However the Conservatives criticised the plans, including they’d drive suburban areas to take extra housing from city Labour areas.

Beneath the plans, English councils will as soon as once more have to include government-set housing targets into their long-term plans to allocate land.

Councils that beforehand failed to take action confronted seeing their energy to dam new developments curbed.

However Rishi Sunak’s authorities downgraded them by saying they need to solely be advisory, in a bid to put down a riot of backbench Tory MPs in late 2022.

Talking within the Commons, Ms Rayner cited it for example of the Conservatives “caving in to anti-growth backbenchers” and placing “get together earlier than nation”.

She added that new house begins have been prone to drop beneath 200,000 this yr, effectively beneath the earlier authorities’s total 300,000 goal.

Labour additionally plans to vary how the targets are calculated, together with by ditching a 35% “uplift” for the most important city areas launched by Tories and tweaking how the system accounts for housing affordability.

Official paperwork present the modifications will imply councils total will now need to plan for round 370,000 properties yearly, as a substitute of the present 305,000.

However some city areas beforehand coated by the uplift, that are largely Labour-run, will see their targets go down.

The annual quota for London, the place the uplift at present applies to every particular person borough, is ready to drop from just below 99,000 properties to round 80,000.

Birmingham’s goal is ready to drop from 7,174 to 4,974, and Coventry’s will go down from 3,081 to 1,527.

A few of these councils have beforehand complained the uplift targets have been unrealistic. Ms Rayner stated London’s determine would nonetheless be a “large ask” and the earlier goal was “absolute nonsense”.

She admitted that a few of the new targets could be “stunning” – however argued the previous system had produced some “odd outcomes”.

Nevertheless, the modifications have been criticised by shadow housing secretary and Tory management hopeful Kemi Badenoch, who stated it will lead to extra uncertainty.

She additionally argued it may drive suburban and rural areas to take housing from Labour-held interior metropolis areas.

Elsewhere, the federal government has given extra particulars of its plan to make it simpler to construct on sure components of the inexperienced belt, protected land that surrounds larger cities.

It has proposed that councils with inexperienced belt of their areas ought to evaluate the boundaries if they can not meet housing want “by way of different means”.

New steering will say councils ought to look to reclassify beforehand developed land, or land that makes solely a “restricted contribution” in the direction of targets reminiscent of defending countryside and the particular character of historic cities, as “gray belt”.

Officers stated they may not say what quantity of the inexperienced belt, which covers 12% of England’s land space, could be reclassified, with the ultimate quantity relying on the alternatives made by native authorities.

Improvement in gray belt areas will likely be topic to new “golden guidelines”, together with on the proportion of recent properties which might be categorised as reasonably priced.

Labour additionally plans to ditch a requirement for brand spanking new properties to be lovely, arguing it was too imprecise and had been interpreted otherwise in several areas.

The Greens referred to as the planning shake-up a “distraction from Labour’s failure to step up and fund the actual solutions to the housing disaster, together with large-scale funding in really reasonably priced, sustainable council housing.”