Bring housing into Planning Act 2008 regime, say law firm and consultants

The Government should consult on bringing housing within the Planning Act 2008 regime for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) as a matter of urgency, a report commissioned by law firm Bond Dickinson and planning consultants Quod has urged.

The report – based on the views of housing and planning experts in both the public and private sectors – claimed that use of the NSIP regime could harness the power of the private sector and “relieve hard-pressed local authority budgets”

Fewer than half of the estimated 240,000 new homes needed each year were completed in 2014, and the last six years had seen the lowest level of housebuilding since the Second World War, it added.

The report insisted that there was widespread support for creating new settlements on the scale of the post-war New Towns in order to address the housing crisis.

However, it argued that this was unlikely to happen without policy and legislation that overcame the current barriers to bringing forward large-scale housing and mixed use projects within the current planning system.

The report noted recent research suggesting that only 25% of local planning authorities had a local plan which had been adopted as sound since the publication of the Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in 2012.

Almost half (46%) had no plan or were still working to a pre-NPPF plan, and a third (33%) of current plan examinations have been suspended due to housing issues.

The report argued that while any mechanism for bringing forward new settlements would be controversial, the NSIP regime was one of a very limited number of feasible options.

The regime’s perceived advantages included fixed timescales for decision-making, a single consenting process that includes compulsory purchase, and the confidence provided by the upfront establishment of need.

Other ways of delivering large-scale housing were reviewed for the report, including existing mechanisms such as Urban Development Corporations, updated New Towns legislation, the use of expanded Local Development Orders some form of deregulated New Homes Zone, and new proposals such as garden city commissions, “but all of these rely on the public sector to rise to the challenge”.

The NSIP solution “could be a valuable addition to the existing frameworks and, uniquely, it would harness the power of the private sector”.

Kevin Gibbs, Partner at Bond Dickinson, said: “This is a national crisis which needs a national solution. The principles of localism are laudable but the current planning system simply doesn’t ensure that local authorities will deliver housing on the scale we need.

“There is a clear imperative for central government to lift restrictions on housing delivery and show strong political leadership in driving large-scale housing development in the national public interest.”

Quod Director John Rhodes, who was last week appointed by the Government to chair a panel of experts examining ways to streamline the Local Plan-making process, said: “Remedying the chronic under-provision of housing should be an economic and a social priority.

“At present, however, developers are denied access to the national infrastructure planning process for housing proposals and thereby denied the use of the single most effective regime for delivering development.

“With appropriate safeguards in place, the use of the NSIP regime would transform the ability of the private sector to make a meaningful contribution to the national housing crisis.”