Angela Rayner ‘will force councils to build houses if they miss targets’
In her statement of 30 July 2024 the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner set out her plans to ‘get Britain building’ to address ‘the most acute housing crisis in living memory’ by means of a revised pro-growth NPPF which is out for consultation with adoption planned for late September. The government has pledged to build one and a half million high-quality, well-designed and sustainable new homes across the country within five years.
This has the potential to have major impacts on planning policy in Wealden. In early 2020 Wealden District Council voted to scrap its Draft Local Plan after a planning inspector concluded that it failed to meet the duty to cooperate and was unsound on a number of grounds. Some four years later on the 15 March 2024 the Council finally launched its public consultation on a new Draft Local Plan. However this is already in trouble as the government proposes to remove paragraph 226 of the existing NPPF and re-establish the requirement for all local planning authorities, regardless of local plan status, to continually demonstrate 5 years of specific, deliverable sites for housing. Up-to-date local plans are essential to ensure that communities have a say in how development happens and going forward all authorities will need to have a Local Plan in place that address a mandatory Housing Target arrived at using a new Standard Method.
It is to be hoped that as few as possible of the new homes are delivered by the volume housebuilders, whose speculative ‘identikit’ estates have wreaked havoc on the countryside and led to unaffordable and car-dependent executive homes. Imaginative architectural solutions are capable of ‘unlocking’ the value of sites within existing urban and suburban areas. Do not hesitate to be in touch if you require help with ‘unlocking’ your site.
Angela Rayner, Draft, local plan, NPPF, Wealden, Wealden District Council