John Nettleton, group property and partnerships director at Audley Villages discusses issues with planning applications and clashes with the environment around the built environment
After just six months in office, the UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves took to the stage to discuss how the government plans to create economic growth – and housebuilding was rightly a key focus of Reeves’ speech. In one pivotal moment, the Chancellor announced that she was “genuinely shocked” at how slow the planning process for building new homes or restoring old ones can be.
Throughout the speech, the government took aim at ‘unnecessary’ planning barriers. The government’s aim is to build 1.5 million new homes within the next five years, but delays in decision-making have for a long time been clogging up the planning sector, which in its current state would make hitting the outlined target virtually impossible. In order to combat the issue, we must begin to look at the regulations placed on housebuilders and find solutions to speed up the process. The government needs to accept that they will need to make difficult sacrifices to achieve this, and there will be political risk.
What’s the issue?
Part of the challenge of dealing with historic buildings is that you never know what you’re going to find when you start work. Carrying out intrusive surveys for protected buildings often gives these sites a different profile risk to new build schemes. If we add the current regulatory pressure into the mix – including environmental assessments and increased fire regulation – this can all lead to increased costs and a delayed programme. This, in turn, means delayed move-in dates for owners.
Whilst planning may not be at the forefront of people’s minds when we think about economic growth, getting projects off the ground has been a growing problem for some time. According to the National Infrastructure Commission, the average wait time to get consent for nationally significant infrastructure projects increased from 2.6 years to 4.2 years between 2012 and 2021. Currently, over half of major infrastructure planning decisions are being challenged in court – compared to a long-term average of 10% – adding an average of 18 months to building projects, plus millions in cost.
Too much red tape
There is no silver bullet to improving the planning system. What is needed, however, is decisive action on multiple fronts. Firstly – and perhaps most importantly – there needs to be environmental planning reform, stopping individual assessments for each project.
Currently, developers must complete a number of different environmental assessments, and sometimes, these assessments have already been completed by a third party, causing further unnecessary confusion and delays. The sheer number of regulations, some of which overlap, conflict, or differ by region, has made it more challenging and expensive for developers— particularly small and medium-sized enterprises —to maintain compliance. All of this can mean projects take years to get off the ground, often leaving companies to bleed money unnecessarily.
Whilst removing government red tape is an important step towards further housing developments, we can’t ignore the potential environmental impacts that moving too fast and too soon could cause green belt and brownfield sites across the country. The Green Finance Institute argues that the continued degradation of nature is currently hindering the UK economy and could result in a potential 12% decline in GDP in the future. Investing in the restoration of nature would not only drive economic growth but also enhance resilience to climate change.
When HS2 was being built, the builders had to allocate £100m to a bat tunnel. Whilst many environmental groups welcomed this lengthy – and costly – process, it’s clear to many that the resources and time used for one tunnel could have been used to deliver more homes for people – and quicker.
Finding a happy medium
Understanding the middle ground for improved planning but also environmental restoration is going to be one of the key things to ensure growth. Bats and newts may seem incredibly niche – and relatively minor to some, but for those of us in the sector, these types of regulations have caused and will continue to cause significant delays if decisive action is not taken.
Essentially, reforms to the UK planning system are undoubtedly needed to bring down costs and speed up delivery, and the government has not shied away from making major changes, which are welcomed in the planning community. However, streamlining planning rules alone will not be enough to achieve the government’s target of 150 new major projects and 1.5m homes in this parliament. We must begin to consider the other key factors, including interest rates, market incentives, foreign investment, and the availability of skilled labour and materials, which are also essential to ensure we hit house-building targets.
Ultimately, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is widely welcomed across the industry, but it must ensure it addresses the housing challenge this country faces in a more creative way than just plain housebuilding. First-time buyers are often the first group of people considered when housing targets are discussed, but we also have an ageing population under-occupying much of our housing stock that should not be forgotten.
One much-needed planning reform is to help local authorities better understand specialist housing classes and to mandate that age-specific housing should be included in every large-scale development. This would free up existing stock and ease housing pressures significantly.
Overall, it’s clear that planners, the government and environmentalists all want to build towards a sustainable future – whilst not compromising our country’s dire need for housing and infrastructure development.
Going forward, it is important we begin to bulldoze the blockers currently in place and put pressure on the government to expedite current planning processes if there is any hope of making its housebuilding targets. At the same time, we must think differently about our housing stock and structure, ensuring all members of society are catered for. Whether that means building new homes for first-time buyers, restoring old buildings so that the elderly population can live alongside one another, or reducing regulations to allow homes to be built on brownfield land. There is no ‘one size fits all approach’, but if we don’t start moving quickly and with certainty, the 1.5m target is looking less realistic by the day.
