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Title:
Homes for the Future
Date:
24 - 07 - 2007
The Housing Green Paper signals the Government's strategy towards achieving the linked objectives of meeting the growing demand for housing, creating places and houses people want to live in and making housing more affordable. The consultation period extends until 15 October.
Key features include:
Meeting growing demand
- 2 million new homes by 2016 and 3 million by 2020
- 150,000 - 200,000 additional homes in the new round of RSS, and plans under consideration, together with further partial RSS reviews
- An additional round of new growth points, including for the first time growth points in the north of the country
- Invitation for local authorities and developers to propose 5 new eco-town schemes
More rural new homes
- Housing and Planning Delivery Grant to direct extra resources to councils delivering a high level of housing
- A raised target of 200,000 new homes to be delivered on public sector land by 2016
Better homes
- An additional £300m through the Community Infrastructure Fund
- Planning Gain Supplement Bill remains in prospect but with the proviso that if a better way of achieving the funding can be identified the government will be prepared to defer the legislation. The Green Paper sets out alternative approaches
- Higher standards of sustainability for new housing and all new homes to be zero carbon from 2016
- A "light touch" review of CABE to maximise its contribution to good design as housing growth expands
Affordable housing
- £8 bn programme for affordable housing 2008-11
- At least 70,000 more affordable homes and at least 45,000 new social homes per year by 2010-11
- Proposals for new local housing companies that local councils can establish in partnership with the new homes agency
- Many more shared ownership homes through local housing companies and public sector land
- New ways for councils to use their land and resources to build homes
The Green Paper is wide ranging in its scope and gives rise to a number of unresolved and potentially controversial issues, for example:
- Mechanisms for delivery of the government's objectives, and the role of the various agencies involved
- The need for clarity in terms of steps which will be taken to overcome perceived planning obstacles to the delivery of housing
- Reconciliation of the need for new housing development with constraints imposed by land subject to flood risk and other constraints
- The likely response to the heralded new towns and the potential implications for the development of Green Belt land.
For further information, please contact:
Alastair Crowdy Planning & Development Director - London - 020 7851 4900
Mike Beese Planning Director - Bath - 01225 822400
Mike Baker Planning Director - Manchester - 0161 829 7800
or your usual GL Hearn contact.
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