Oral evidence: DCLG consultation on National Planning Policy, HC 703Monday 8 February 2016
Oral evidence, 8 February 2016.
Witnesses
Rachel Fisher, Head of Policy, National Housing Federation, Peter Andrew, Deputy Chairman, Home Builders Federation, and Councillor Martin Tett, Vice-Chair, Local Government Association Environment, Economy, Housing and Transport Board, and Leader of Buckinghamshire County Council, gave evidence.
Chair
Thank you very much for coming to give evidence this afternoon. Just going down the table, could you indicate who you are and the organisation you represent?
Peter Andrew
I am Peter Andrew from the Home Builders Federation, and I am deputy chairman.
Martin Tett
I am Martin Tett. I am representing the LGA, and I have to be clear that is a cross-party organisation. I am not here representing Buckinghamshire County Council, of which I am Leader.
Rachel Fisher
Hi, I am Rachel Fisher. I am Head of Policy at the National Housing Federation.
Chair
Thank you very much. The Government have come up with some proposed changes to the NPPF and it is consulting about them. That is why we are here this afternoon. Have these changes come out of your experience of what has been happening to the planning system since the NPPF was introduced? Is it addressing concerns you may have about how the system is currently operating?
Peter Andrew
The NPPF has been in for four years. In general, it has been pretty robust. We are seeing more planning consents coming through. The fact it has lasted four years without any significant change has shown that it is working pretty well. That said, there are some tweaks that need to be done. That is what this session is about. I do believe that it is right to look at a lot of what is being talked about in the consultation, yes.
Martin Tett
I might have a slightly different twist on that. As the LGA, we support the Government’s objective of trying to build something like 230,000 houses in a year. That is the right thing to do. We think the introduction of the NPPF was a very positive step forward. Virtually every local authority supports that and they have actually been working very hard to deliver against it. We are seeing local plans now coming into place, but actually, the local planning‑process is quite a long-drawn-out one. They are only just beginning to come into place in a lot of areas. As the LGA, we have argued that there ought to be a proper review of the impact of the NPPF so we look at the impacts and assessment of it in the way you would do in any other area, rather than basing changes on what appears to be, quite frankly, a fairly ad hoc and anecdotal series of feedback by vested interests. We would argue for a much more thorough and logical review of the impact of the NPPF.
Rachel Fisher
Like my colleagues, we also welcomed the introduction of the NPPF and we think it has been a positive step forward in terms of planning. I would also welcome a more robust and in-depth assessment of what the impact of the NPPF itself has been on the delivery of housing. Obviously, we have seen an increase in planning permissions granted and we have seen an increase in housing starts, and we welcome that. But the terms of NPPF consultation at the moment, like the NPPF itself, are quite pithy, so we don’t have a huge amount of detail behind the proposed changes that we see happening. It would be important for us to reflect that in any comments on the NPPF changes. We would always want to see more detail just to know what the impacts are going to be.
David Mackintosh
Do you think the details in the consultation are enough for their impact to be properly understood and assessed?
Rachel Fisher
No, to give a very short answer. On some things we have more detail than on others, but it is quite a light consultation and there are a number of things, particularly around starter homes and the changes to the definition of affordable housing, about which we would want to see more of an impact assessment undertaken. We would need to have more details to be able to do that impact assessment. We are still waiting for the full consultation on starter homes. That is not due out for a while. So we won’t actually be able to tell you what the impact of this is going to be. We would want to see more before we could say what the impact is going to be.
Martin Tett
I would absolutely concur with that. We have a situation here where we are talking about changes to the NPPF almost in parallel with the Housing and Planning Bill going through Parliament, which itself may well get amended. So you have two variables, really. Logically, wouldn’t you put one in place and then look to change based upon it? Trying to change both at the same time seems to be slightly illogical to me. The other issue is this. I completely agree with Rachel. There are some very vague recommendations in the proposed changes, which are quite hard to pin down in terms of their impact. Starter homes is an obvious one. I suspect you will ask more questions on that in due course, so I won’t do that now, but even stuff down to the definition of commuter hubs—they are terribly vaguely defined: an interchange between a train and something that has a cycle capability. You can park a bike outside a railway station; does that make it a commuter hub?
Peter Andrew
I would agree. There is still detail to come out, particularly on starter homes. I am in agreement with my two colleagues here.
David Mackintosh
How much will the outcome of the consultation be affected by the Housing and Planning Bill and the findings of the expert panel on local plan making proposals?
Martin Tett
I think I have sort of replied to that question just now. I would not do the two in parallel. You have two variables. Logically, you would wait for the Bill to have gone through the Lords. You would assess any changes that have been made as a result of the lobbying there that may or may not be accepted by the Government in due course, and then you would do a proper assessment of the NPPF in the light of both the Bill, and its practice in the real world and how it has actually worked. Then you would bring forward the changes. It seems as if it is driven more by anecdote, and perhaps the Government’s agenda in terms of starter homes, than by any logical review.
David Mackintosh
What do you think about the provisions in the Housing and Planning Bill that allow pilots for alternative providers to process planning applications?
Rachel Fisher
From our perspective, that is one of those situations where there are some places where this is already happening. Barnet has already started outsourcing some of its planning applications and that has been seen to speed things up. What we really need to be talking about is actually resourcing of planning departments in the main. It is not just a situation where it is the decisions that are being taken; it is a situation where we need to be able to properly resource planning authorities to objectively assess their housing need and then work out where those places should go, figure out their five-year land supply. All of these things take a lot of resource and a lot of time. I am not convinced that taking the decision-making stuff out of that pool is necessarily going to solve the problem we have with planning for housing.
Peter Andrew
I would agree with that. It is a wider picture and it is certainly around resourcing in local authority departments, both for plan making and decision making. It will drive some more decisions, if that makes sense, but it needs to be looked at in the round, around local authority resourcing in general.
Martin Tett
If I can build on that as well, the issue for me, as I understand it, is not that the final decision making will be taken away from councillors, but the processing of the applications will be done, potentially, by a third party. The fundamental problem is the lack of proper resourcing in local authority planning departments. We are haemorrhaging staff at the moment, quite frankly, predominantly to the private sector, which can pay significantly more than local authorities can. That is starving local authorities of key skills that we need, quite frankly, at a time when we are trying to get more planning applications through and also produce good plans. That is the other thing. It is not just about the extension next door; it is about producing really good plans to help build communities. You need that whole team in place. Outsourcing bits of it will actually detract from the whole, in my opinion. You have to look at this holistically. Potentially, I would argue, unless good safeguards are put in place, there is actually a problem of conflicts of interest. If you are outsourcing it to an organisation that may be even remotely involved through, potentially, other departments in planning applications in the same area, you have to make sure that very strong Chinese walls exist between those who are assessing an application and those who are promoting, potentially, a hostile development elsewhere.
Peter Andrew
Certainly, my view would be that it ultimately has to be about local authority resourcing, getting resource to the local authority and the local authority delivering for its community. However, I would not want to see a slowdown, looking to outsource some of this work, if you like, and for it to be brought back into the local authority for decisions and that slow up the time period in which we can get resources into local authorities. There is a longer-term play and a short-term play and we need to be aware of both.
Chair
How can a local authority make an independent decision if negotiations about the application, including all of the conditions, are made by a private sector alternative provider? Presumably, then, that provider is going to be the one that advises the committee before they make their final decision.
Martin Tett
To whom is the question directed?
Chair
Anybody who would like to answer it.
Peter Andrew
I see the work that would go out of house, if you like, to some consultancy is around technical issues. These are technical matters that some decisions will need to be made from. As long as the decisions come back in with a recommendation, of course, to the local authority, that would be fine.
Martin Tett
I partly answered your question just now. There is massive potential for conflicts of interest. I understand entirely that you can have Chinese walls—lots of organisations do—but if it is a controversial application I can see all sorts of grounds for potential judicial review, which could actually slow down the planning process rather than speed it up. I add that word of caution.
Helen Hayes
During the Housing and Planning Bill Committee stage, several members of the Committee argued that the solution to the resourcing problems that councils have is simply for councils to innovate, share resources, commission external providers and so on. I wonder if you could comment on that very briefly, because it seems to me that is quite a significant response to a problem that has been given and we should hear from you.
Martin Tett
I guess that question is directed at me. I gave evidence before. The issue of innovation is an important one, in so far as I completely support the sharing of resources, just as a general principle. We have two councils locally, Chiltern and South Buckinghamshire District Councils, which are both separate and which share departments and save a lot of money by doing so. But the fundamental issue in planning is that, generally, councils are haemorrhaging staff, particularly to the private sector. That is not even a sticking-plaster on the problem, quite frankly. Generically, yes, you can save a lot of money, but it does not address the fundamental issue that we don’t have the right planning skills, we can’t retain the staff, and they are going out to much better-paid jobs in the private sector. Quite frankly, we need to have an attractive profession that pays adequately to return people to the public sector.
Mr Prisk
As some of you will have heard, I was raising the question around sustainable new settlements with the previous witnesses. This may be more to do with the LGA. I know the LGA said it feels that the consultation’s proposals are necessary, but I wonder whether any of you feel that any of the proposals will make a difference in the promotion of sustainable new settlements. Is this a missing piece in the long-term answer for the housing jigsaw? We have talked about lots of initiatives, but the one thing that has not seemed to have advanced much in the last 18 months does seem to be the question of a sizeable number of notable new settlements identified and progressed. If I can start with the LGA, clearly this is a vexed issue from local authorities’ points of view.
Martin Tett
The issue of new settlements is best determined locally, quite frankly. With great respect to both the previous Labour Government, a couple of terms ago, with all the eco-town proposals, and the Coalition, with the new towns that were being proposed, there is a real danger of top-down prescription on these sorts of things. Unless you actually understand the local circumstances in an area, the housing need in the area, the mix that is required locally, the availability of land, the local constraints, the infrastructure and so on, there is a danger that top-down prescription that, “You will have an eco-town” or, “You will have a new town” is actually hitting the wrong mark. I think it should be—it is actually quite clear in the NPPF—that there is a requirement for a five-year housing land supply. It is deliverable. Local councils are bringing those forward. They know the best places to place those houses. Particularly in two‑tier areas, the county would normally ask them to put them in areas that are sustainable. In other words, you want them around existing urban settlements, because that means you can provide facilities much more cost-effectively, be it children’s services, adult social care, health services and so on, rather than scattering development around rural areas. There are lots of forces that actually bring sensible planning down at a local level. If you try to impose something from the centre that may be overruling local decision making, I worry that you will end up with bad plan-making. I would argue that everything you need is already in the NPPF. Where it is appropriate, councils will bring forward either new settlements or urban extensions. But imposing them top-down is more likely to lead to local resentment. Do you remember the campaign against the eco-towns about eight years ago? It was not a terribly popular one for certain people in Government. Personally, I think it is barking up the wrong tree.
Mr Prisk
Do you see no role for small new settlements?
Martin Tett
No, I am sorry. With respect, that is not what I said. The top-down imposition of new settlements is misguided. New settlements will be brought forward and they will be brought forward by local planning authorities, who understand the local need, the local land availability, the infrastructure that is available in a local area and what can be provided. Where appropriate, they will bring them forward, either as new settlements entirely or as significant urban extensions. That will be with the will of the community and the support of local councils, rather than having something imposed downwards in a quasi-judicial fashion from a central Government. Is that clearer?
Mr Prisk
Yes, I am the last one to suggest imposition downwards. As I mentioned to the others earlier, it is more looking at whether small districts will naturally focus on their five years. At some point, I want us to step back and think about 25 years in larger geographical areas—in counties, sub-regions and city regions.
Martin Tett
Of course, that is a slightly different question. Then you go back to why they do not have structure plans, which were abolished about 15 years ago. Because I am a county councillor, I might well argue that they were very good things and they actually provided a much better geographic focus than the mosaic of district council planning. However, that is stepping outside my remit on the LGA.
Mr Prisk
Very wise.
Peter Andrew
I am in agreement with that. Any new settlement really needs to be driven locally and have as much local support as it can get. I caution against new settlements that are too grand in scale. Garden cities, for example, will be very difficult to bring forward in any kind of timescale—purely because of the scale that is being looked at. However, smaller settlements—1,500 to 5,000 units—are eminently deliverable. They can grow over a period of time. There is a place for new settlements, be it on the edge of town or, actually, on new locations. There is a lot to be said for having new locations and settlements. I would support it absolutely, but it needs to be measured in terms of scale and we need to grow it over time. We should get a settlement and grow it, rather than go for a 20,000-unit settlement from the start.
Rachel Fisher
Yes, there is something to be said here for political leadership, vision and political will that bring the community with you. That can happen at a local level. I wonder whether the duty to co-operate has a role to play. We were going to have some further guidance on how to give the duty to co-operate further teeth, which is still forthcoming. I wonder if something in that could support the development of larger settlements. Obviously, we have a severe housing shortage and we are going to need to employ all the tools in our toolbox. Some of that is going to be about small sites and small developers; some of that is going to be thinking very big. That will be large-scale urban extensions, garden cities and those sorts of things. As long as local authorities are able to work together to be able to develop the strategic vision and the plan, with good place making and homes for everyone at different price points—all of these sorts of things that we know how to make good places; there is not a lack of information on what good place making looks like—hopefully we will then be able to deliver this. However, it is going to take political leadership and a lot of political capital to get any of these off the ground, otherwise we would have seen more of them coming through already. I welcome the two paragraphs in this particular consultation on the NPPF because it is keeping this issue on the agenda, not necessarily because it is actually solving the problem.
Mary Robinson
The Housing and Planning Bill will require local authorities to maintain a register of brownfield sites suitable for housing development. At the same time, the consultation has a presumption in favour of development on brownfield land. Is this likely then to lead to a “brownfield first” approach?
Rachel Fisher
We would welcome the introduction of the register and the delivery of homes on brownfield land, where it is appropriate. Again, I go back to the idea that it is important we ensure we have good place making and this brownfield land is actually in the right place. Some assessment that has been done of this shows that we have enough brownfield land for about a million homes, which is about four and a half years of housing supply. Yes, it might be brownfield first, but that does not mean we are going to have to have brownfield only. It is going to come back to the local planning authority to make a decision on where the right place for housing is going to be. Whether that is brownfield, greenfield or, indeed, green belt, we need to have a grown-up and nuanced conversation about where the homes are going to go so we ensure they are in the right places.
Martin Tett
As a general principle, we support the idea of building on brownfield rather than greenfield. That is our first priority. It comes down to what you mean by brownfield, for a start. I remember the campaigns against garden-grabbing, which were very popular about six years ago. How big does a garden have to be before it is a brownfield site? You can also stray into some very unpopular policies down this road. There is also the issue of infrastructure and location. It is good to say, “Let’s build on a brownfield site,” but where is it? What access does it have to facilities? How near is it to a major road? Is there a railway station anywhere nearby? Does it have access to health facilities? Are you creating something that, quite frankly, is just a blob of housing in the middle of nowhere that you would never normally allow if it was just an application on a greenfield site? You need to look at it in the round context. That is why I keep coming back to the fact that local councils are best placed to make these sorts of decisions. Normally, we would prefer brownfield sites, but there may be other factors.
Mary Robinson
The LGA would not necessarily support these proposals. Are they necessary?
Martin Tett
We support the idea of a brownfield register, which is in the Housing and Planning Bill. We would support a hierarchy, effectively, of decision making based on brownfield first, but you have to have—dare I say it?—a common-sense approach to this, which does not always creep into Government documents, whereby local decision makers can overlay that with the real world that says, “It may be brownfield, but there is no transport, there are no roads, there is no employment nearby. You are just creating an unsustainable place where you are going to create more cars going backwards and forwards to the nearest urban centre. This is not a logical place to build houses despite being brownfield.”
Mary Robinson
From the housebuilding point of view, how should the higher costs of developing brownfield land be met?
Peter Andrew
Ultimately, the extra cost of brownfield development has to be met by the landowner or the developer, effectively. There is a viability argument when that links into section 106 and CIL requirements. Ultimately, however, it is a balance between all of those. Coming back to the brownfield register, at HBF we are supportive of that. We would be concerned if a brownfield register turned into brownfield first so that we went back to a sequential test. We think both greenfield and brownfield land need to be developed to produce the number of homes that we require. This links in with small builders, the SME point that gets raised, which is about the fact we have lost about 80% of our smaller developers over the last seven or eight years since the recession. Part of that is due to the number of small sites that are coming through the system. A brownfield register will help that, without a doubt. We need a mixture of all sizes of sites, be it a garden city or garden village at one end right down to the sites of two or three at the other end, to get the number of homes built. Sites are not actually the key point; it is the number of outlets that homebuilders have in terms of their outlets to sell. That is the key thing. We may go a little further, actually, and say that there should be a presumption for brownfield development within a settlement boundary that is slightly further than what is proposed at the moment. However, our view would be that if we really want to get lots of small sites and we want to get developers back into this business—because they are going to find these sites rather than local authorities—it can be in partnership with local authorities to help that through, but we have to activate the marketplace to find these small sites and then bring them through the system. We are heading in a good direction. I would just take it that little bit further so we can energise the smaller end of the marketplace to go and find these sites and bring them through on to the register.
Mary Robinson
Would that be done as part of the site allocation process?
Peter Andrew
It would, but it needs to be a constant thing. The presumption I am thinking of is a constant presumption. Sites are coming forward all the time as these guys find sites a local authority or somebody like you or me would never even think of. That is what they did back in the 1980s.
Mary Robinson
Would that negate the local planning process, though, in a way?
Peter Andrew
No, they could come through as exception sites or windfall sites. It feeds in to the local plan process, but it also feeds in to the ongoing five-year land supply.
Chair
It could count as a windfall site, could it not? They are allowed under the NPPF.
Peter Andrew
Yes.
Kevin Hollinrake
This is to do with a point that was covered already, which was the presumption, proposed within the consultation, in favour of small sites as well as brownfield sites within settlement limits. What are your thoughts on that, really? Obviously, this is adjacent to settlement limits as well. Do you have any concerns about or thoughts in this area?
Peter Andrew
From my perspective, we are pretty supportive of that, for the exact reasons I have just said. If we are going to solve the housing problem we have, we need to bring more players back into the marketplace, wherever they come from. With an 80% reduction in small builders, we need to get some of these guys back. These are the sites they will bring through the process and develop, rather than the big developers.
Martin Tett
If I understand your question correctly about the small sites aspect of the proposed changes, in general terms it is a good idea to develop small sites. I get that. The definition that is proposed is: fewer than 10 houses. Two issues arise. One is: what is fewer than 10 houses? If you have five-bedroom houses, that can be quite a large site. If they are 10 flats, that could be quite a small site. They both meet the same definition. Do you have a consistent definition of what a small site is? I am not sure there is in this. Would it be better actually to have one based upon the acreage? That dates me a bit; convert that into metric. The actual land take might be a better definition than the number of units. The other issue we have is, quite frankly, that in a lot of areas you are getting multiplicities of small sites, quite often adjacent to each other. Quite often, where there were once big houses, they come down and you get a replacement of blocks of flats or whatever. Very quickly, the next one will go and then the next one will go. Individually, each one is a small site; cumulatively, there is a lot of extra housing there that puts a big strain on local infrastructure. You will get lots of congestion; there will be lots of strain on local schools, doctors’ surgeries and so on. Each of them, however, is below the threshold for a section 106 contribution. Local authorities get no money to mitigate the impact of what turns into quite a substantial number of new properties, new residences and so on—whereas, if it had been brought forward as one big site, we would have had. Although it is a good idea in principle and I can understand where the philosophy has come from, you need to look at the law of unintended consequences here, which asks, “Is the definition right?”—and I think it does not work as it is. Secondly, when you have a lot of these together, which you will get over a period of time in certain areas, the cumulative impact is very substantial and there is no contribution to infrastructure.
Rachel Fisher
I would just echo that.
Kevin Hollinrake
Would this policy make it less likely that landowners will come forward with rural exception sites for affordable housing to rent, for example?
Rachel Fisher
That is a real concern. One of the worries that we have about a number of the changes that are proposed within the NPPF would be that, ultimately, you would see a rise in the price of rural exception sites and a lack of them coming forward. This is particularly around allowing starter homes on rural exception sites. A number of our rural members are very concerned that this will mean that exception sites will not come forward, because the starter homes would not be affordable in perpetuity. That is the basis on which a lot of these properties are coming forward. That would be a worry. There are wider issues around smaller sites. We agree that having 10 or fewer is too blunt and the cumulative impact does mean that, actually, you are going to need to have a negotiation between the developer and the local authority to ensure you are going to get the appropriate amount of community infrastructure coming through.
Helen Hayes
Should starter homes be included within the definition of affordable housing?
Martin Tett
I saw that question coming. As the LGA, there is obviously general support for the principle of affordable housing. We also want to see more people, if possible, become homeowners. However, we recognise that affordable housing actually has to cover a multiplicity of different needs. There will be people who can afford low-cost market housing, but there will also be people who cannot. There has been a lot of analysis that shows that large segments of the population will not be able to afford the sort of starter homes that are currently being proposed. Therefore, what local authorities should be allowed to do, we believe, is to look at their local circumstances again and look at the type of mix of truly affordable housing that is required in the area. That may be a mix of social rent, some Help to Buy and some low-price market housing. Really, by looking at your own area and looking at your own circumstances, you can determine the right mix. They need to be allowed to bring forward the right type of developments in their area in negotiations with property developers that will provide that. The danger of effectively saying that starter homes are “it” is that you will get a lot of these houses, but local authorities will still have the statutory responsibility of housing people, but without any tools to do the job. That will really be a problem for councils all over the country.
Rachel Fisher
From our perspective, the emphasis on starter homes is slightly distracting from the fact that what we are talking about is a change to the definition of affordable housing to include homes that are not affordable in perpetuity. That is a different thing from whether or not we think starter homes should be included as affordable housing. Starter homes are not yet a tested product. We would possibly like to see pilots of starter homes and market-testing. There a lot of theory floating around at the moment about whether or not it will cause the crowding out of other affordable tenures—Help to Buy and all of these sorts of things. Without further detail on starter homes, it is hard to say what the impact of those is going to be. However, we do think that while our members are keen to deliver starter homes in some areas, this is not the issue. What we really need to be thinking about is how we enable local authorities to plan for their objectively assessed housing need. Martin has laid that out really eloquently. We would be very concerned if the change to the definition of affordable housing meant that you would actually get less truly affordable housing in perpetuity back, because we don’t think that would necessarily represent value for money to the public purse.
Peter Andrew
From an HBF perspective, we are generally supportive of having the definition of affordable housing include some market product. We are in favour of all types of tenure from an affordable point of view. We see a place for some open market product, as well as the rental and shared equity products sitting alongside it. We see them all.
Martin Tett
Can I add support to what Rachel has said? I should have mentioned it before. This perpetuity test is really significant, because if the discount only applies, effectively, for five years and then you can sell at a market price, you will have this constant situation where you produce something that is quasi-affordable and in five years’ time it just goes straight back up to the market price and you have lost that affordability in the local area, and only people who can afford the new real market price can move in. As the LGA, what we have argued is that that should either be in perpetuity, so that it remains truly affordable for a long period of time, or, if the Government would not accept that, a compromise of a substantial period of time, possibly 10 or 20 years, so that you can block out speculators who are effectively buying it cheaply to sell it on in five years.
Helen Hayes
The consultation proposed allowing starter homes to be built on brownfield sites in the green belt, rural exception sites, greenbelt land allocated in neighbourhood plans and unused or unviable commercial land. What will the impact of that spread of possibilities be?
Rachel Fisher
It will be different for each of those things, but ultimately, you might see inflation of land prices because of what Martin has just said about the return to full market price of these properties after a five-year period. Obviously, people are going to plan for that.
Helen Hayes
They will buy it as an investment.
Martin Tett
It is not a bad bet, is it?
Peter Andrew
Certainly, where there is land that is allocated for some other use that is demonstrably not coming forward, and the market assessment shows that, whatever marketplace that particular allocation is for, that land should be used for a different use, it cannot stay there in perpetuity not being used. I am generally supportive of bringing land that is not going to be used for its current allocation forward for starter homes
Rachel Fisher
I am in favour of bringing it forward, possibly for a different use, but I am not convinced that necessarily has to be just for starter homes. We need to be able to look at what the other options are. Again, the right place to do that, I would argue, would be the local planning authority.
Martin Tett
There is probably a nuanced difference between Rachel Fisher and myself, in so far as your question was very specifically about green belt, as I heard it. There is an issue here, which is that green belt, as it was originally set out back after the War, was actually meant to be land kept open in perpetuity. If you get to a situation where you start to say, “Well, this bit is not valued; that bit is not valued. Let us build on this; let us build on that,” you very quickly have a situation where the openness of the green belt starts to become eroded. When you go through a green belt review, you have to look at the defensibleness of boundaries that are meant to remain for a significantly long period of time. Let’s say you build in an area that is maybe the other side of a natural boundary—perhaps a railway line, but there is a brownfield site just the other side of it. You say, “That is brownfield. Let’s just build on that.” Actually, what is the nature of that brownfield site anyway? It might well be quite an open area that has quite a large wildlife benefit. You break up the openness of the green belt but, much more importantly, you have then breached that defensible boundary. In the period of time afterwards, I predict, someone will come along to the next adjoining piece of land and say, “You have lost that. Let us create a new defensible boundary a little bit beyond that.” Progressively, over time, you will get an erosion of the green belt. That goes against all the principles of the green belt. If you are going to have exceptions for the green belt, we would argue that it needs to be done through a proper local planning process carried out by the local authorities, where they can test the impact of releases from the green belt, so you have a proper, defensible long-term boundary produced.
Helen Hayes
What criteria should be used to assess whether a change of use from commercial land uses to residential is appropriate?
Peter Andrew
That is an interesting one. It could be a certain number of years that the land has been allocated and not come forward, and probably some form of study that shows that in the foreseeable future—two years or whatever it happens to be—that land is unlikely to get developed. We can put some tests in place.
Martin Tett
I would have a slightly different view on that. If you have somewhere that really has no viable long-term future in its current use, the general principle of converting that to housing is a reasonable one, but you have to look at the local circumstances. Where is this property? Is it somewhere people would want to live? Does it actually have reasonable infrastructure? Does it actually have transport nearby? Does it have access to doctors’ surgeries? Is the period of time a reasonable one? If it were three years, you might well argue that in a recession that lasts five years, at the end of that five-year period that employment land will be needed again. Some local councils take a very long-term view of redevelopment of town centres. Actually, what you would want to have is that land considered as part of a bigger site where, actually, you might want to have a more substantial redevelopment of a town centre to rejuvenate it. Again, you have to come back to this question of what the local context is, rather than having hard and fast rules imposed in an NPPF. As opposed to top-down, you have to allow local authorities the ability to look at the individual situation and make the right judgment based on their own local circumstances.
Chair
Clearly, there is a national problem of not enough houses being built. In a local area, if a local plan says, “This is the number of houses we need to be built,” and that number is not being built, is it not entirely reasonable for the Government to bring in a housing delivery test and say, “Something needs to happen here. We are not building the number of homes that are needed”?
Martin Tett
Something must be done.
Peter Andrew
Yes, something will need to be done, but it needs to be done in partnership between the local authority and developers. I see this as being a partnership. I would like to wind the clock back to the 1980s or the 1990s, when local developers and local authorities sat down on an annual basis and started to look at trajectories from all the sites that are moving forwards, so a local authority’s trajectory can actually be based on current information from developers. Then if, for example, one site is not delivering or it is not delivering as much as it was originally intended to, for whatever reason that happens to be, decisions can then be made as to what to do with it: allocate another site, bring forward a site that is further back down the plan period or whatever. I see this as a partnership, but there needs to be a consequence, as such. That can be delivered locally by the developers and a local authority.
Rachel Fisher
I would agree with the need for a partnership approach. Obviously, I would argue that housing associations should be part of that partnership. You can have a table that is genuinely representing the entire housing market to be sure we are able to come up with a way forward together. We are currently developing some thoughts on what kind of censures should be in place for significant under-delivery, which we are putting together back at the ranch, so to speak. Clearly, however, there is a need to hold people accountable for what is being delivered and what is not being delivered. We have seen an increase in planning permissions and not the same increase in housing starts. Clearly, this is a very knotty problem.
Martin Tett
I would answer your question, maybe, in two parts. If houses are not being delivered, should there be consequences? Yes. To whom should those consequences be allocated? I may have a difference of view here, because local authorities are required in a local plan to have a five-year deliverable land supply. We do not believe that local authorities and their granting of planning permission is the problem here. If you look at all the statistics, nine out of 10 applications are being approved by local authorities. There is a pipeline of something around just under 500,000 units that have been granted planning permission that have not yet been built. Is there a problem? There is, in so far as approved planning applications are not being built out. That may be for a variety of potentially reasonable reasons and some unreasonable reasons. Some might be to do with the state of the national economy. It might be to do with the availability of mortgages and people’s incomes. It might be—though I hesitate to say this—that it is in the interest of some developers to restrict supply and, therefore, keep prices high and, therefore, maximise their profits. That is a quite laudable objective in a market economy, but it would entirely wrong to then blame the local authority and penalise them for that situation. What we would say is that has to be a consequence and, quite frankly, developers have to accept their partnership share of that. If they have a planning application that is approved, and they are sitting on a significant area of land that could be converted into houses and they choose not to do so for a significant period of time, there should be consequences. I have suggestions on that, but you may wish to ask me a further question.
Peter Andrew
From my perspective, the number of planning consents has gone up. There is no doubt about it. There were 250,000 last year and that is a very positive number. What is quite stark, though, is that the number of operational outlets that developers operate from—certainly the national players—has not gone up. In terms of the number they anticipated to get and the number they are getting, it is stoically stuck. It has been stuck at the same sort of level for about 10 years. There is an element here of: what constitutes an implementable consent? Getting a planning consent does not enable you to go on site next week. There is a myriad of things, for sometimes up to 12 months, to fix. There is an implementable consent piece of work here on what number of sites is there that have a consent and need to be brought forward. I come back to this outlets business. The key to getting more homes is absolutely the number of outlets or shop fronts from which housebuilding is delivered. That number is stoically staying steady. We need to find a way of speeding up getting the number of outlets up. The planning consents are there, but it is not trickling through to implementable consents.
Chair
We are coming to the end of our time. Martin, you were indicating that you had one or two suggestions you could leave us with about how we could break into this particular problem.
Martin Tett
If you would like a couple of ideas, yes. These are not LGA policy, but they are ideas we have kicked around unofficially at the LGA. I completely accept there will be issues like finalising the planning conditions and things like that; they do not take forever, though, and some of these sites have been potentially undeveloped for years and years and years. We think there are options whereby, for example, if you do not have the site developed after a reasonable period of time—that will be a number of years—you should start to be able to levy either the community infrastructure levy or, alternatively, council tax as if those sites had been built. The longer they remain unbuilt, the higher the scale would become. You would start at a low level and you would build up over a period of time. It would provide a financial incentive on a developer to bring forward that site. Again, you would have to have a reasonableness test in this. You do not want to penalise a developer that has very good reasons for not developing a site. However, if it is simply based on trying to restrict supply, clearly we think that would be one approach one could take. The second idea is to actually look, in the extreme, at allowing local authorities to compulsorily purchase land that has been granted planning permission and unreasonably left undeveloped for a long period of time. The compulsory purchase would have to be fast. You don’t want to drag through lots of court proceedings, judicial reviews and so on. The compensation would be based upon the original land value, not the developable value of the land. That would provide quite a strong incentive to a developer to get on and build the houses the country needs.
Chair
I suspect we could have quite a long argument about this with Peter Andrew.
Peter Andrew
We might have a debate, yes.
Chair
Anyway, on that quite controversial but nevertheless interesting point for us to consider as a Committee, thank you all very much for giving evidence to us this afternoon. That brings us to the end of the public proceedings today. Thank you. Oral evidence: DCLG consultation on National Planning Policy, HC 703 3