Developers have welcomed Labour’s intentions to liberalise the planning regime in England and Wales to kickstart the building of new homes and infrastructure, even as rural organisations warn about the possible consequences. Labour announced on Wednesday it would enact a series of measures to make it easier to get planning permission, including forcing local authorities to stick to mandatory housing targets and making it easier for government bodies to issue compulsory purchase orders. Keir Starmer has put these reforms at the centre of his growth agenda, telling MPs: “We will reform the planning rules – a choice ignored for 14 years – to build the homes and infrastructure.” The prime minister’s stance was backed by the country’s biggest housebuilders. Neil Jefferson, the chief executive of the Home Builders Federation, said: “Planning has been the biggest constraint on housebuilding in recent years and the measures proposed will address the main areas of concern by bringing more land forward for development more quickly.”
The planning and infrastructure bill will include reforms to liberalise the planning regime, the most significant of which will be the reintroduction of compulsory population-based housing targets for local planning authorities. Michael Gove, the former housing secretary, relaxed those targets last year, but government officials say they intend to reimpose them by this autumn after a short consultation over the summer. Labour is hoping the targets will prove an important tool in helping them reach their promise to build 1.5m homes over the next five years. The bill will also make it easier to issue compulsory purchase orders on undeveloped land by allowing local government bodies to ignore the “hope value” of a site – the additional value that would be created by building on it – when setting a price. Ministers are promising to give more resources to local councils to help process planning applications, having previously pledged to appoint 300 new planning officers by the end of the parliament.
And they say they will also simplify the process for getting consent for significant infrastructure schemes such as power stations. The government said that legal objections to such projects had become so common that planning applications now often run to tens of thousands of pages – though it did not say how it intended to stop those objections. However, there were also early signs of the probable resistance ministers will face as they seek to implement the new regime. Tim Oliver, the chair of the County Councils Network, warned about the risk of developers being allowed to build homes without the necessary infrastructure nearby – a common complaint of those seeking to block new developments. Oliver said: “As important as housing numbers is the actual infrastructure that both enables and mitigates development, with councils in county areas suffering from significant infrastructure funding gaps.” CPRE, the countryside charity, warned Labour against building on the green belt, which the party said in opposition it wanted to enable. The charity said: “The green belt is the countryside next door for 30 million people in the UK and has huge benefits for food security, physical and mental health and nature restoration. Protections for it must be maintained in the policy framework.” “New homes on the green belt have rarely been genuinely affordable and create car-dependent communities far from public transport networks and other essential infrastructure.”