The housing white paper and infrastructure

Yesterday, a long-awaited white paper on housing, Fixing our broken housing market was published. A bold title, considering that roughly the same party has been in power for getting on for seven years.

Anyway, the main proposals are contained in two chapters ‘planning for the right homes in the right places’ and ‘building homes faster’. Although the focus is on housing, obviously, there are some potential knock-on implications for infrastructure projects.

There is no sign of housing becoming a type of nationally significant infrastructure project (NSIP) in its own right, although at a conference yesterday it was confirmed that the ‘element of housing’ provision was likely to come into force this April.

In the first chapter, local plans will be required to be updated every five years. Neighbouring authorities may have to agree a statement of common ground on co-operation on housing. The effect of changing local plan policies will have to be taken into account by infrastructure applications as ‘important and relevant’.

Of interest to land referencers, the government aims to achieve ‘comprehensive land registration’ by 2030 (which I take to mean all land having to be registered with the Land Registry, although not spelt out as such). This could include options and restrictive covenants, the latter of which will be reformed according to proposals from the Law Commission.

The government will explore ‘land pooling’ as an alternative to compulsory purchase, giving an example from Bonn in Germany, where an 80-landowner plot of agricultural land was pooled, built on by the local authority and the plots redistributed to the landowners in proportion to the land they originally owned. This probably wouldn’t work for an infrastructure project but might for an element of housing associated with it.

As has been widely publicised, the ‘exceptional circumstances’ under which land can be removed from the Green Belt are spelt out, but whether this waters them down or not is a matter of speculation. The paper does say that where land is removed from the Green Belt, the quality of the remaining Green Belt should be improved to compensate. Presumably this should be the case when the Green Belt is built on too.

There are a lot of proposed changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), plus a bit of a backlog from previous pronouncements, and so a comprehensively changed draft is promised for later this year.

The second chapter is about getting planning permission implemented more quickly. Although there are a few carrots in the form of faster discharge of conditions and addressing a skills shortage, there are mostly sticks.

A refundable fee for making a planning appeal is mooted, mentioning £2000 as a maximum.

‘National policy’ is to be amended to require local authorities to exploit development opportunities given by new infrastructure, giving HS2 as an example. This could have implications for highway projects in particular, and perhaps improve their benefits.

‘The Government will review what more we could do to ensure that utilities planning and delivery keeps pace with house building and supports development across the country’, which could have implications for the planning of electricity, gas and water NSIPs.

A paragraph headed ‘a strategic approach to the habitat management of protected species’ appears only to deal with speeding up licensing for great crested newts, which has been trialled in Woking by using ‘plan level’ licensing rather than individual development licensing. That is often an issue with NSIPs (see the green fence in the colour picture on this page about the construction of the A556) but will be tricky to co-ordinate at plan level.

The main stick is a proposal to reduce the standard condition about the starting of development from three years to two years. This may have a knock-on effect on the drafting of Development Consent Orders. Local plan policies will be overridden by the NPPF if housing is not being delivered as required, on the grounds that the plan is out of date. This will start at only 25% of expected delivery being met triggering an override, ramping up to 65% by 2020. Again, this will have an effect on the weight to be attached to local plan policies if the trigger is triggered.

Finally, the government will look at compulsory purchase powers being available for local authorities to intervene in stalled sites, i.e. ones that have permission and have started but not completed development.

The Annex is essentially a consultation document consisting of questions on the proposals in the white paper, which you might not spot if you didn’t read to the end of the white paper. I don’t think I’ve seen a combined white paper and consultation document before. The consultation opened yesterday and closes at 23:45 on 2 May.

Of particular note a new draft of paragraph 14 of the NPPF is proposed, which is the one about the presumption in favour of sustainable development. No more golden threads.

There are 38 questions in all, some multi-part, so a lot to digest and respond to there if you are particularly interested in housing. The last question is about onshore wind and the NPPF, so do read to the end.