Angela Rayner has unveiled an overhaul of planning rules in a push for 1.5 million new homes to be built in five years.
The Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary will ditch measures brought in by the Tories that Labour has blamed for hampering new development.
She set out a revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), the guidelines that govern the planning system, to MPs on Tuesday.
– Which Tory measures is Labour scrapping?
Labour’s new NPPF reverses changes made to the guidelines by Rishi Sunak’s government in December last year.
At the time, then-housing secretary Michael Gove made housing targets for local authorities in England advisory rather than mandatory and allowed councils to allocate less land to future development if local officials could argue it would damage the character of an area.
This resulted in swathes of local plans with lower housing numbers, Labour said.
It also blamed the Tories for damaging supply, with forecasts that fewer than 200,000 homes would be built in 2024-25 under their policies.
Labour also intends to drop Conservative changes to the NPPF requiring new homes to be “beautiful”, arguing it is subjective, difficult to define and leads to inconsistent decision-making on applications.
– What other changes to the NPPF is Labour making?
The method for local authorities to calculate how much land they must allocate for new housing, which relied on data from 2014, will be updated to ensure supply is boosted in every part of the country.
Moving from a population-based projection to a stock-based method, it will require councils to ensure homes are built in the right places and development is proportionate to the size of existing communities while adding an extra level of ambition in the most unaffordable areas.
In addition, the revised NPPF makes clear that the default answer to brownfield development should be “yes” and promotes homebuilding at greater densities in urban centres, like towns and cities.
But because there is not enough brownfield land in the country to meet housing needs, the Government will allow the targeted release of so-called grey belt land, which includes disused petrol stations and car parks on parts of protected land known as the green belt.
Labour argued that while the previous Tory government allowed building on the green belt in a haphazard way, its sequential release test will be more strategic.
Under the system, if a council’s housing targets cannot be met through brownfield sites or co-operation with neighbouring authorities, grey belt would be freed up for construction.
Any green belt land used will be subject to “golden rules” to ensure that development delivers 50% affordable homes with a focus on social rent, and has access to green spaces and infrastructure such as schools and GP surgeries.
The Tories’ legacy on housing is a scandal – their failure lurks under every stone we lift.
This Labour Government was elected on a mandate to build the homes Britain needs.
We’ll take tough choices to unblock the planning system to make it a reality.https://t.co/OoTpvjWApU
— Angela Rayner (@AngelaRayner) July 28, 2024
And in the longer term, ministers are also laying the groundwork in the NPPF for universal local development plan coverage across England.
With only a third of councils currently having a plan that is under five years old, Labour aims to boost that level including by ending changes and disruption to planning policy.
Ministers will be ready to intervene to ensure all authorities have one in place by a specified point next year, taking over a local plan if insufficient progress is made.
Finally, the Government is consulting on reforming how the nationally significant infrastructure projects regime applies to solar, onshore wind, databases and giga factories to support economic growth.
The new draft NPPF will go out to consultation for eight weeks from Tuesday.
– What else has Labour announced?
Labour is taking immediate steps to counter the decline in the number of social and affordable housing.
It is introducing new flexibilities for councils, including allowing them to use their right-to-buy receipts to build and buy more social homes.
A review into the right-to-buy discounts introduced in 2012 is under way, with secondary legislation to follow in the autumn to enact the changes Labour intends to make.
Details of Government investment in the form of direct grant funding for social and affordable housing, as well as certainty on rent stability, will be brought forward at the autumn spending review.
And ministers have confirmed a £450 million of investment in the local authority housing fund to help create homes for families at risk of homelessness.
