Housebuilders call for new limits on local politicians blocking developments in England and Wales

Housebuilding applications should be fast-tracked on sites that have already been set aside for development, according to the Home Builders Federation, which called on the next UK government to “take the politics out of housing”.

Local planning committees’ interventions in housing developments that comply with existing policies should be more limited, the trade association said, and there should be a new, higher national standard for when committees can intercede. 

The HBF, which represents commercial housebuilders responsible for 80 per cent of new homes in England and Wales, has put forward a list of proposals aimed at speeding up the planning process and delivering badly needed housing. 

“We’re not suggesting for one minute that there is not a democratic process for how land gets identified and released,” Stewart Baseley, HBF executive chair, told the Financial Times. But he said decisions about where to put new homes should be made by councils when they drew up their local plans to guide development, and not rehashed for each specific application. 

After a site is set aside for housing, “the planning application on that land should then be done in a professional manner by professional planning officers,” he added. “What all too often happens when developers make an application on zoned land is that the whole debate about the principle [of where to build homes] gets reopened.” 

The high level of discretion granted to local politicians to adjudicate on specific applications in the UK planning system has been singled out as one of the key challenges to speeding up the process — alongside staffing declines. 

The number of big planning cases being decided within official deadlines has declined from 60 per cent in 2012 to just 20 per cent last year. New home construction in England is projected to fall to roughly half the official target of 300,000 this year, according to Savills. 

At present, councils have different rules for when planning committees should review applications and when they are dealt with by officials. In some areas, a single councillor can call in an application for review. 

The HBF’s proposal echoes a policy suggestion in the Competition and Markets Authority’s recent study of the industry, which said the government could consider streamlining the system by “removing the use of planning committees for those applications which are broadly in-line with the local plan [or which are] below an agreed threshold”. 

Only about 20 per cent of local authorities had an up-to-date local plan in place to guide development, the HBF said. Outgoing levelling up secretary Michael Gove last year introduced a set of policy changes intended to encourage councils to bring forward these plans, but at the same time scrapped hard targets for housing delivery in each local area under pressure from backbench MPs. He argued that development needed to have local support. 

The HBF said the government should increase the incentives by only giving infrastructure funding to authorities with a local plan. The Labour party declined to comment. The Conservative party did not respond to a request for comment. 

Baseley, who has led the HBF since 2006, praised David Cameron’s Conservative government for increasing building up to 2020, with support for first-time buyers and planning reforms. But he said in recent years the Tories had been “spooked . . . by a series of by-election defeats and more local defeats” that the party attributed to voters pushing back against development. 

Although he declined to endorse a party for the UK general election on July 4, Baseley said the industry group is “closer to Labour” on housing policy — including on issues such as releasing poor quality land in the greenbelt for development and reinstating housing targets.

But he warned that if Labour won, they would still face the political backlash from anti-development groups that had hampered the Tory government. 

“One shouldn’t underestimate for one minute that a Labour government is going to face exactly the same objections on the local level as the current government does,” he said.  

“Labour have very firmly parked their tanks on the Tories’ lawn and said ‘if you don’t want to be the party of home ownership, then we will be’.”