John,

London has a Housing Capacity Study (HCS) that considers how much housing could be built on each piece of identified land.
The process is rigorous and local authorities are participants in the process of analysis and decision.
Some try to continue to negotiate reductions in the targets placed on them within the regional spatial strategy (the London Plan) but the system seems to work. The basis of it is that all the homes London needs could be built at the mid point of the density range that applies to each site examined (determined by a lot of factors in the London Plan). That gives confidence and assurance. I like regional strategies and regional targets imposed on local authorities and I’m pleased we will keep ours, but that is thought to be because London is different. Decentralisation could be taken too far for the capital’s good.

I appreciate the concerns of others about regional plans being thrown away before there is something tangible in their place. It must be adversely affecting appeal decisions.

Despite my enthusiasm for the London HCS, the process is not delivering the social housing percentage that we need, as developers try to maintain their profit margins in the face of extra demands placed on them by energy efficiency standards and space standards for new buildings.

Peter Eversden

Peter

The London Plan sounds like one of the Structure Plans that we used to have. LA’s were consulted and inputed into the County Structure plan with regard to housing numbers for each district in the County. The numbers were site specific following a land availability study in each area, rather like your HCS.  There were always some authorities trying to get their numbers down so at the end of the day the County Council had to “make a fist if it” but at least the compromise was reached at local level i.e. County and District. Once the county structure plan was adopted that was it. If a developer went to Appeal but the proposal was contrary to the Local Plan, Structure Plan or National Policy as set out in the Planning Circulars, they wouldn’t stand much hope. The only grounds for further Appeal was on a point of Law through the courts. 

There is a serious shortage of affordable housing in the UK and the changing demographics are making this problem more acute. As you say developers are faced with significant increases in costs which cannot be recouped in selling prices, so their margins are under pressure. The only way they can offset these costs is to pass them on to the land owners by paying less for the land. Land in the SE and London in particular does not grow on trees complete with planning permission, so the planning system is a constraint on supply. Knowing this landowners tend to hold out for the maximum price.

Does the planning process have a part to play in all this and if so how is it respond. We are building less new homes now than at the end of WW2 and have managed to upset at least half the population in the process. Quite an achievement if it wasn’t so serious!

There’s no simple answer of course. All that happens is that we try to change the emphasis from time to time. Sometimes we go into constraint mode with lots of policies designed to slow down the rate of house building and at other times we try to remove the obstacles to building more houses- like a presumption in favour of sustainable development, whatever that means exactly.

The Localism Bill is attempting to square a difficult circle. The government want more houses which they see as in indicator of economic growth, which they can tax, but they also want to stop the way development decisions are forced on communities and neighbourhoods that say they don’t want them. But as my maths teacher at primary school used to tell us, “Two into One won’t go”. I suspect that the long term solution is to get our leaders to explain that we just can’t go on like this and we are just going to have to manage with less. I can’t see any politician doing that can you? Well perhaps Mahatma Gandhi but he practised what he preached and that’s the difference.

John

Of course, house prices are determioned by the market: houses are expensive because, among other reasons like limited supply, some people have sufficient wealth to buy them. In some communities, sufficient people have sufficent wealth to buy several houses (assisted, of course, by the tax relief available to them when they borrow for the purchase, then obtain rental income). The problem is not actually that there are necessarily insufficient homes per se - unless one believes that so many houses should be built that prices fall to ‘affordable’ levels. But this would obviously be disastrous for existing owners/mortgage holders. The problem is, rather, that houses are not affordable by a significant proportion of the vital members of our society. This is a ‘problem’ of wealth discrepancy, not inadequate numbers of homes. I use inverted commas, because, of course, wide wealth discrepancy is not necessarily bad; I am not arguing that point, merely pointing out that it is wealth discrepancy rather than inadequate numbers of houses which is what makes housing ‘unaffordable’ to so many. Patently, the planning system, is, at best, an extremely inadequate mechanism for addressing the shortage of affordable housing. Assuming that wealth discrepancies are not going to be reduced anytime soon, the only effective way in which the truly critical housing shortage (i.e. the shortage of affordable homes) can be adressed seems to be by building them, but this would necessiate political will and the drastic erosion of land values, unless huge subsidies were available.