Labour Don't Know their Planning Acts from their .....But I have a Cunning Plan

Last weekend Labour Leader Ed Miliband spoke to the National Planning Forum in Birmingham and, amongst many other things, suggested that there should be a 'use it or lose it' policy toward those dastardly housebuilders who are not building out their sites and are therefore solely responsible for the economic woes of this country. He said:

"Across our country, there are land-owners with planning permission, sitting on land, waiting for it to accumulate in value and not building on it.
We have to change that.
Including giving councils real power to say to developers that they should either use the land or lose the land".

Hmm. Hold on their Ed m' lad (why do I keep hearing Pitt the Younger in that  'Rotten Borough' episode of Black Adder) isnt that a bit like shooting the golden goose?

And anyway, if he had bothered to read Section 94 of the Town & Country Planning Act the powers are already there. Section 94(2) states:

"If the local planning authority are of the opinion that the development will not be completed within a reasonable period, they may serve a notice ("a completion notice") stating that the planning permission will cease to have effect on the expiration of a further period specified in the notice". 

Such a period must not be less than 12 months after the notice takes effect.

So authorities across the land could serve completion notices like confetti right now on all those uncompleted housing sites and apply the 'use it or lose it' principle at no real cost to the authority.

In 35 years of practice I have never seen this power (which has been around for all that time) put into practice. Why not? The concept is fundamentally flawed primarily because it is self defeating. We would effectively switch off all those sites that have been carefully curated in Local Plans to deliver to the raft of planning and development criteria . Where's the sense in that?

There is no point using a big stick to beat up anyone who doesn't deliver on a promise that they never really entered into in the first place. If that principle applied the Government should rightly be threatening to shut down our car industry for failing to sell sufficient new cars, or our our high street retailers for not selling enough 'stuff'.

Well, as Baldrick was prone to saying 'I have a cunning plan'.

Up to now both this and the previous Government have been stressing the desire to 'get the housebuilding sector going' and to kick start the economy by building for the future'. Clearly failing to realise that it is not the housebuilders fault per se, but the fact that people cannot afford to buy new (or any) houses because they have all just been made redundant and/or can't get a mortgage from any bank; even if their first born were handed over in part-ex.

Housebuiders like to build houses. That is their raison detre (the clues' in the title). But having bought land at the top of the last economic cycle, spent the annual budget of a small nation state to secure planning permission and set aside another substantial 'wedge' for all that Community Infrastructure Tax Levy, let alone the cost of building any houses in the first place, it is not surprising that the average developer wants to recoup some of that cash in order to remain solvent. Or am I being just a silly old liberal planner here?

We want affordable housing, and lots of it. Not solely social housing for rent, but houses that people can actually afford to buy. That gets them on the housing ladder. That may become their pension scheme in the longer term!

So what we really need is affordable 'market' housing. OK so far? 

Why not make a provision in planning that a proportion of the 'affordable housing' element of most modern planning permissions can be provided as 'affordable market housing', instead of just handing over 35% or more of the land value to a Housing Association. 

I'm sure there would be a clever contractual (Section 106?) means of ensuring that house prices reflect local purchasing capabilities (we sort of have that now anyway) for a period of years so that the properties remain 'affordable' for sufficient time and then can be released to move on up the value ladder, whilst more affordable market housing comes up behind to replace it. 

We know from the '£60,000 House' competition of a few years ago that good quality houses can be built down to a price. So let's enable the developers to get clever (subject to the usual design and planning controls), whilst they can also make a small turn on their investment, rather than look at the affordable housing quota as a cost to recover from the remainder of any housing scheme.

The developers would have something practical to go at, the banks could justify more flexible mortgages secured against properties with a defined value, and the Government would receive the approval of a public who could begin to return to an ownership model whilst also revving up the development sector.

Just a thought.