The Labour Party is taking its first steps in government, and it appears Keir Starmer is sticking with his self-description as a YIMBY.
As trailed in the King's Speech, the government has launched a fast-track consultation on the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) which is due to close on 24 September 2024. The government is moving quickly: they want to implement the updated NPPF before the end of the year.
As well as setting-out how the country will build the houses it needs (constructing on the 'grey belt', reforming CPO rules), the NPPF will reintroduce mandatory rules on how many homes must be built in each local authority area.
Housing targets fell in and out of favour with the last few Conversative governments: Liz Truss scrapped the 300,000 homes per year objective during her time as Prime Minister, but took to the 2023 Conservative Party conference calling for 500,000 new homes to be built each year. Michael Gove later clarified that the 300,000 homes annual goal remained live, but as a statement of ambition rather than a mandatory target.
The NPPF consultation paper, published on 30 July 2024, reinstates a mandatory national housing target for England and increases it to 371,000 per year (up from 305,000). How this total figure is split by region has been simplified: a 0.8% uplift is applied to the number of houses in each local authority area. To this formula, an adjustment factor for affordability is applied so that the housing target increases in areas where the average house price is more than four times the average income.
The revised NPPF "removes arbitrary caps and additions" with an ambition to "be straightforward to understand and apply". One such addition to the previous housing formula was the urban uplift: a rule that, due to continuing urbanisation, the 20 largest cities needed to build more new homes than the default formula required. This has been scrapped.
Despite that change, urban areas remain a focus for housebuilding. Under the old housing targets, London needed to construct nearly 100,000 homes per annum. This ambition has been reduced to around 80,000 homes under the revised formula, meaning that London will be required to build 22% of all new homes in England (down from 33%). However, this goal still represents a significant practical challenge for a city which last year completed 35,000 new homes. Meanwhile, the areas with a Mayoral Combined Authority (for example, the West Midlands and Greater Manchester) will see their targets increase by 30%.
The changes to housing targets in the NPPF are guided by four principles:
- increase house building to 1.5 million over five years,
- provide more certainty to the housing sector,
- build houses where they are needed most, and
- be simpler.
The government admits that it is facing headwinds to achieve the first of these ambitions over the course of this Parliament: the OBR is forecasting that fewer than 200,000 homes may be built in 2024. The government's aspiration, however, is clear: "get Britain building again".
