18 COMMENT THE SOCIAL NETWORK
THE HOUSING STATS DON’T STACK UP
Patrick Mooney, editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance
Patrick Mooney, housing consultant and news editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance asks, do the Government’s numbers for how many homes with planning permission have not been built stack up?
SINCE 2010/11 ENGLISH COUNCILS HAVE GRANTED PLANNING PERMISSION FOR 2.78 MILLION NEW HOMES, BUT ONLY 1.6 MILLION HAVE BEEN BUILT
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occurred recently, when the reported number of unbuilt homes with planning permission almost exactly matched the number of house- holds on local authority waiting lists. In making a pitch to the Government for additional powers and resources, the Local Government Association revealed that since 2010/11 English councils have granted planning permission for 2.78 million new homes. But over the same 10-year period only 1.6 million homes had been built, creating a shortfall of 1.18 million homes. A month earlier, the Ministry of Housing released its latest figures for social housing lettings in the previous year. Among the mass of statistics included in its press release, was one informing us that there were 1.15 million households on local authority waiting lists on 31 March 2020, which represented a one per cent decrease on the previous year. The closeness of the 1.18 million and the 1.15 million figures should not fool us though – the waiting list for a council house would not be wiped out simply by building all of the homes with planning permission. Not only are they located in different places across the country, but they also do not match up in terms of size, housing type, price or affordability. Even if we wanted to make the waiting list disappear, it could not be achieved by ‘nationalising’ the pipeline of unbuilt homes with planning permission. Life is not that simple!
T AN ANNUAL CONTEST
The LGA produces figures every year showing how many homes remain to be built, despite being granted planning permission. And, every year the volume housebuilders cry ‘foul’ in return, claiming that they are not sitting on a vast land bank, and that bureaucratic planning rules and regulations need to be overhauled if they are ever to build sufficient new homes to meet the nation’s needs. This
here is a strange and mysterious coinci- dence about housing statistics sometimes, and one of those occasions
year was no different. As part of its lobbying of Government ahead
of the Queen’s Speech, the LGA argued that local councils should be helped to build at least 100,000 new homes a year and that councils should also be able to charge developers the full council tax charge for every unbuilt house when the original planning permission expires. The LGA also wants the Government to make it easier for councils to use compulsory purchase powers to acquire stalled housing sites or sites where developers do not build out to timescales contractually agreed with a local planning authority. This was the equivalent of the LGA putting their tanks on the housebuilders’ pristine, manicured lawns. In response, the Home Builders Federation denied that developers were sitting on land unnecessarily. Andrew Whitaker, its planning director, said: “While housing supply has doubled in recent years, the planning process remains the biggest constraint on further increases.
“Many of the homes included in the (LGA) numbers will have actually been completed or are on sites where construction work is ongoing. Others will only have an initial consent and be struggling their way through the treacle of the local authority planning departments to get to the point where builders are allowed start work.”
BOLD ACTIONS REQUIRED As we can see, the HBF returned fire on the LGA, and we are no nearer to achieving the Government’s target of 300,000 new homes being built every year. Although in fairness to the HBF’s members, it is only right to point out that builders have increased housebuilding rates in recent years, with completions reaching 210,600 in 2019/20, its highest level in the past 10 years. But for the country to somehow generate
another 90,000 new home completions in the coming years to reach the magical figure of 300,000, the LGA believes that councils need to be empowered to increase their output.
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