Local government fully shares the Government's commitment to significantly boost housebuilding and stands ready to work constructively with ministers, communities, and developers to deliver the 1.5 million safe, decent, and genuinely affordable homes that the country urgently needs. To successfully tackle this crisis and turn these shared ambitions into reality, it is vital that councils are equipped with the right powers through the planning system, along with the skills, resources and long-term funding to take effective local action.
Key messages
- The LGA and councils across the country recognise the severity of the national housing and homelessness crisis. With over 1.3 million households on social housing waiting lists and record numbers of children living in temporary accommodation, councils are operating at the very sharp end of this emergency. Local government fully shares the Government's commitment to significantly boost housebuilding and stands ready to work constructively with ministers, communities, and developers to deliver the 1.5 million safe, decent, and genuinely affordable homes that the country urgently needs. To successfully tackle this crisis and turn these shared ambitions into reality, it is vital that councils are equipped with the right powers through the planning system, along with the skills, resources and long-term funding to take effective local action.
- This consultation’s proposals represent the largest shake-up of planning policy since the NPPF was introduced in 2012. Given the breadth of changes proposed, and the potential implications each change could have, we strongly urge Government to give consideration to this response and the responses of our member councils - those most intrinsically involved in plan-making and decision-taking - with relevant care and attention. The LGA and councils are ready and willing to discuss policy implications with Government.
- Planning is about creating communities linked with the right economic activity and public services, whilst conserving and enhancing the natural and local environment. Critically, local authorities must be empowered to take their residents along with them on this journey to develop and build more homes. That is because it is not just homes that are required to create thriving, attractive and desirable places and communities in which to live but the accompanying local and national infrastructure, to be developed both now and phased at early and timely stages alongside the development of new homes, which is of primary concern for residents.
- People cannot and do not live in planning permissions. The Government must take urgent action and work with the development and housebuilding industry to ensure there is a suitable pipeline of sustainable sites, which once allocated in a Local Plan and / or given planning permission, are indeed built out. Local authorities must be given greater powers to ensure prompt build out of sites with planning permission and we urge the Government to come forward with the outcomes of two consultations from last year regarding build out. Councils should not be subject to punitive measures, regarding the delivery of housing, which undermine the plan-led system including the five-year housing land supply test and the Housing Delivery Test.
- While we support the Government’s aim to improve the efficiency and consistency of the planning system, we have significant concerns about the limited flexibility within the proposed reforms for planning committees. A standardised approach does not account for the diversity across local planning authorities, and it is essential that councils retain the ability to tailor decision-making processes to reflect the specific needs of their communities. The involvement of elected councillors in planning decisions is the backbone of the English planning system and our reservations about a national scheme of delegation centre on this role potentially being eroded.
- Government must remain mindful that – with devolution, widespread local government reorganisation, the introduction of spatial development strategies, and with two approaches to plan-making with definitive backstop dates in place – this is a period of significant flux, change and uncertainty within local planning authorities.