The Government has made some significant changes to national planning policy in a bid to deliver 370,000 homes a year.
Labour believes the updated national planning policy framework will help them succeed where other governments have failed and provide a much-needed boost to economic growth.
Commenting on the National Planning Policy Framework, published today, CPRE chief executive Roger Mortlock said:
‘The broken housebuilding market is to blame for the painfully slow delivery of much-needed new homes. When big housebuilders deliberately limit the supply of new homes to maximise their profits, supercharging the current system will not lead to the change the government is looking for.
‘The government’s plans risk a huge hike in the number of unaffordable, car-dependent homes. Building on England’s 1.2 million shovel-ready brownfield sites would do far more to unlock growth, regenerate communities and provide sustainable, genuinely affordable new homes.
‘We welcome the commitment to local plans and affordable homes. However, local authorities responsible for delivering new homes will be swamped with speculative applications on high-quality Green Belt and farmland. Inevitably, many of these will be approved to meet nationally imposed targets.
‘The ‘grey belt’ policy needs to be much more clearly defined and exclude working farms. It will undermine the Green Belt, one of this country’s most successful spatial protections with huge potential to help address the climate and nature emergencies.
‘There’s some hope ahead with plans for a strategy that covers all our use of land. Longer-term commitments to build genuinely affordable and better designed homes are welcome too. Until then,, our countryside will remain needlessly under threat.’
One Response
As with many things let’s look at the assumptions here:
1 the solution is new homes
2 the problem is there aren’t enough places for people to live
3 countryside is sacrosanct
4 we rely upon new home developers to deliver the solution to the problem
How about
1 people need a place to live
2 there are many void properties
3 a Government backed scheme would release private equity capital to work with local and regional Government to repurpose such properties
4 the number of new builds required would be greatly reduced
5 town and city centres would be revived