The Government has published plans for a ‘Planning Reform Working Paper’ setting out how it will speed up delivery, while stopping ‘developers trading land speculatively’.
Richard Beresford, Chief Executive of the National Federation of Builders (NFB), said:
“Housebuilders build homes. They do not sit on land they can delivery. Landowners, land promoters and developer investors might sell permissions, but this is because they are not the ones building the site out and making the finances work. It would help if the Government provided data qualifying their concerns.
For developers to offer delivery timelines would require a rules-based planning system based on certainty, which is the opposite of the UK system. It also needs major utility, environmental and legal agreement reforms, to name a few barriers. If there are not a considerably high number of penalty exemptions, fewer homes will be built because builders will avoid the risk that planning politics over-rules reality. The biggest winners here are likely to be the lawyers.”
The Government has said that the changes will be delivered as part of their completion notice reforms, which councils have been calling for over several years. It identified that sites with affordable housing are built our more quickly and used this as one justification for their reasoning.
More detail on the proposals, include:
- Only targeting sites of more than 50 homes.
- Build out statement to accompany planning applications and commencement notice when development starts.
- Annual progress report tracking build out progress.
- Delayed Homes Penalty, where completions fall 10% behind the submitted delivery schedule.
- Stronger compulsory purchase powers for the public sector to buy stalled sites.
The development industry will likely be concerned that although planning reforms have been positive, they have mostly been tweaks of focused on the biggest builders who are already doing well from a broken planning process.
Rico Wojtulewicz, Head of Policy and Market Insight of the NFB, said:
When submitting a planning application, there may be more than 70 separate elements to include, and these keep increasing in number. Before any work can begin, some of these will need discharging by the council, who charge for the privilege. Industry cannot afford more bureaucracy, particularly if lawyers may be needed.
If the Government wants to fix delivery issues, it should start with councils and ensure they allocate deliverable sites informed by their local plan. What this means in practice is that if councils have a target of 2,000 homes and allocate individual sites of 700, 500, 300, 250, 100, 80, 50, and 20 homes to meet it, they should ensure sites are not blocked by water, energy or legal constraints and also have a builder attached to delivering them.
Instead, councils often allocate sites without full planning, with lots of complex conditions to meet and to landowners or land promoters. Thy even allocate sites without any knowledge of the landowners intentions. Councils wanted plan making powers but since getting them in 1990, have made excuse after excuse as to why they are failing to meet local housing needs.“
Will Councils gets special treatment?
“In Southwark, of the twenty council projects we studied, the average expected delivery time was three years and average site size was 21 homes. All on sites without protracted affordable housing legal agreements and a planning process the council control.
Focusing on one of those projects, Bells Gardens, planning was submitted in 25 March 2021 with a three year delivery expectation, Yet it still hasn’t been delivered and in February 2025, the council announced it was looking for a delivery partner. Would sites such as these receive penalties for letting down local people?
It is a working paper, so there is much to discuss; however, we have already received considerable concerns from some of the almost 400, mostly SME housebuilders, NFB represents.”
Wojtulewicz, concluded:
“We thank civil servants for passing on our fifty-site threshold recommendations to the new government, who appear to understand the benefits it offers SMEs. To further that support, this ‘Medium’ sized site definition needs embedding into the planning system, rather than on individual policies. And now we have a more ambitious government, we hope the Government also takes our four other impact-based site size definitions on board and justified in our ‘Size Matters’ report.”
