RBWM concerns over new Government's housing targets

The Borough has said it is still grappling with the sweeping new housing proposals from the new Labour government – including upping the assessed housing need in the Royal Borough by hundreds of homes.

The Government is on a mission to boost housing numbers and announced this week that it is prepared to take the ‘tough decisions to step in’ if a local authority is off-track.

Under plans unveiled this week, all councils in England will be given new mandatory housing targets to pave the way to deliver 1.5million more homes.

The aim is to ‘tackle the most acute housing crisis in living memory’.

Of the major changes, the method used to calculate mandatory housing targets will be updated. Previously, these relied on ‘decade old data’.

Local housing need, assessed by central government, identifies the minimum number of homes that a local planning authority should plan for in its area.

Having revised methods, the Government has determined that RBWM’s annual housing target should go up from 866 to 1,341 homes.

The Government has also laid out a definition for ‘grey belt land’; it is part of greenbelt comprising previously developed land and any other parcels that make ‘a limited contribution’ to the five greenbelt purposes.

These are to prevent urban sprawl, protect the countryside, preserve historic towns, support urban regeneration (of for example derelict urban land) and provide access to the countryside.

Examples of these ‘grey belt’ places include land on the edge of existing settlements or roads, old petrol stations and car parks.

For these places, developers would no longer have to demonstrate ‘very special circumstances’ (ie, employment need, economic benefits, etc) to justify a housing development there.

Alongside its home-building agenda, the Government is ‘committed to making it easier to build key infrastructure’ such as laboratories, gigafactories and data centres.

RBWM’s former Conservative cabinet member for planning from the time when the Borough Local Plan (BLP) was formed, David Coppinger, has said he is ‘very disappointed’ by the new housing figures.

He feels his administration already ‘pushed the borough to its absolute limit’ to meet the former Government’s housing requirement.

He felt the BLP, adopted by the previous Conservative administration, while criticised at the time, might provide some protection against these difficult new targets.

Current lead member for planning, Cllr Adam Bermange, said the council is still working to understand the impact of what the Government is proposing, but expressed doubts this was the case, because of the ‘tilted balance’.

If a council cannot meet its housing targets, the titled balance policy puts strong weighting in favour of any proposed housing development – which the Planning Inspectorate would certainly take seriously, should a rejected proposal go to appeal.

“Even though we have a BLP, it will start to be considered out of date,” said Cllr Bermange. “There are some real concerns as to what this really could mean.”

Also of concern is the definition of grey belt and how broad its application may be.

Cllr Bermange expects there will be plenty of speculative applications coming forward as developers grapple with the concept at the same time as local authorities.

“My worry is it’s going to be a drawn-out process of development being refused and going through months of appeal process before we get a clear definition,” he said.

Another Government reform intends to ‘make explicit that the default answer to brownfield development should be yes’.

Though RBWM’s administration broadly supports this, it does throw into question the Borough’s bid to try to stop all its office blocks on brownfield sites from being turned into flats.

Cllr Bermange said there is no sign that the Government is changing its stance on Article 4 protections, which can be brought in to defend specific employment sites from this conversion.

But another problem is that RBWM’s brownfield sites are ‘heavily constrained by flooding’. There are sites that are too high a flood risk to be approved for homes.

The Lib Dem administration is also supportive of the social housing focus.

Separating out social housing from the broader banner of ‘affordable housing’ is a positive step, said Cllr Bermange, as it makes social housing ‘its own target’.

However, the ‘viability’ problem remains, he added.

Developers have previously argued that they cannot deliver affordable housing on sites because they are not financially viable – and so far, these new proposals do not seem to address this.

“It may look good on paper, but will it change things on the ground?” said Cllr Bermange. “If the developer says [it’s not viable], we’re back to where we started.”