Planning for New Homes 13/02/2019 Labelled as Development

On 8 February, the National Audit Office published a report assessing how effectively MHCLG supports the planning regime to provide the right homes in the right places and help meet the objective to 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s. Its key findings are:

• The target of 300,000 new homes will be challenging to meet;
• There is a mismatch between this national target and local targets produced by the standard method for assessing the need for new homes introduced in 2017, and MHCLG needs to monitor and address this;
• By 2020, around half of local authorities are likely to fail the new "housing delivery test" but MHCLG has yet to address the implications of this;
• Spending cuts have contributed to skills shortages in planning departments but MHCLG does not understand the extent of these and needs to do more to ensure they are addressed;
• The Planning Inspectorate is too slow at determining appeals, and the statutory performance measures do not properly reflect the overall time taken by appeals.

Matthew Warburton has produced an ARCH Briefing summarising the main points in the report.