UKREiiF | Matthew Pennycook: ‘That’s the bargain you make’
The UK’s minister for housing and planning took to the stage at Leeds to reassure housebuilders that planning reforms will be largely complete by the end of the year – with the warning that the government ‘expects better’ in return.
Speaking with Andrew Taylor, group planning director at Vistry, he said: “It speaks to the nature of the housing crisis we’re trying to address and why the government has such an ambitious reform agenda.
“Particularly in lots of urban constituencies, the scale of the housing crisis is such that you can’t ignore it as a policy issue. It is probably the number one issue in my post bag…
“In a world where there isn’t a huge amount of money and where some enormous challenges have been left at our doorstep, bringing existing housing stock up to standard, transforming a planning system that was, I think, in all honesty, faltering on all fronts, getting these are all very difficult challenges.”
Defending the government’s 10-month record so far, Pennycook said: “I was told we couldn’t revise the national planning policy framework in six months; we did.
“We overhauled it. We are starting to see in terms of the volume of applications coming through and a different approach to releasing land.
“We are seeing, anecdotally, all across the country, Grey Belt sites coming forward in key places that will that will really deliver. Those changes were made in quick order.”
Pennycook noted that the ‘major planks’ of planning reform will be in place by the end of this year, when the focus will shift to delivering on the government’s housing pledge.
Commenting on the ambitious housing targets, he was quick to distance the government from immediate goals: “We haven’t got a 300,000 homes a year target. We never had. Very deliberately, we’ve got a 1.5 million homes target in this Parliament.
“I am under no illusions, let me tell you, as someone who is living and breathing this – day in, day out – as to how challenging that is.
“We could have picked an incredibly unambitious target that we know we could have hit. We could have picked 1.1 million. It wouldn’t have made a difference the people on my Housing Register in the way that we need.”
Moving into more of the detail around the changes to the planning system, he said: “I say this directly to the developers in the room, in all manner of ways: through a reform of the planning system, we are reducing development costs and risk for you, and we do expect better where it’s not coming through, and it is part of the bargain.
“For example, the suite of revised design guidance that’s forthcoming will play a role for future standards that we’re committed to bringing forward through building regulations.”
