In its annual operating review, house building company Redrow has revealed the delivery of homes is being slowed down due to issues on a local authority level…
Redrow, one of the UK’s largest house building firms, has claimed local authorities are slowing the process of building homes.
The company released the claims in its annual operating review, stating that “whilst a well communicated policy at government level is essential to building more homes, ultimately delivery is very much in the hands of local authorities where all too often planning is stifled by local politics, a lack of resources and unnecessary bureaucracy”.
Redrow Chairman Steve Morgan said the Local Plan process had improved since the introduction of the National Planning Policy Framework and said the company welcomed plans to intervene when local authorities failed to publish local plans by 2017.
The house building sector has been boosted by the government’s Help to Buy scheme, which assists buyers to get on the housing market. Morgan said this had been a “major driver for the [housing] industry to increase output, with 40 per cent of Redrow’s private legal completions using the scheme over the past financial year.”
However, he warned that the process of gaining planning permission was still taking too long. He called for “the burden of red tape associated with needless planning reports and conditions” to be removed.
Planning expert Ben Mansell of Pinsent Masons said: “Local authorities delaying planning decisions is not a new issue and is unlikely to have been helped by the government budget cuts over the last few years.
“However, with the government putting greater pressure on local authorities to deliver housing and the implementation of policies such as Starter Homes, hopefully this trend can be reversed.
“The impact of devolution will also be interesting; while in the long term it will provide local authorities with greater housing powers and should reduce delays to planning decisions, in the short term it may lead to further uncertainty.”