RTPI report shows that house builders hold banks of land with planning permission for 225,000 new homes

The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) has launched a new housing report. ‘Opening up the Debate: Exploring housing land supply myths’, tackles issues of housing affordability and supply head on. It offers new figures and provides five recommendations for a fresh approach to gaining the evidence we need to tackle the housing crisis.

Key new figures in the report show that house builders have banks of land with planning permission close to 14,000 acres, enough for 225,000 new homes. The report goes on to provide evidence on the relationship between land supply and house prices.

The report forms part of the RTPI’s evidence to the Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery. Key evidence from the report includes the following chart recording the likely figures of land with planning permission related to

Kelvin MacDonald, RTPI Director of Policy and Research and joint author of the report said: “House builders and others need to stop blaming the planning system as the sole factor in restricting land supply. If we are to tackle the afordable housing crisis we need to move away from overly-simplistic views of demand and supply and look as well at the other factors that contribute to the crisis. This report provides solid evidence to kick off a much needed intelligent debate.”

The report makes five recommendations:

• House builders should declare the amount of land they currently control with planning permission in each local authority area in a transparent and consistent way so that this figure can be used in the Annual Monitoring Report that forms part of the local development framework system. These can then be aggregated to form a regional data bank. It becomes very difficult to plan for future allocations of land or to understand the dynamics of the housing market in relation to land availability without such information
  
• The new National Housing and Planning Advice unit should publish, on a regularly updated basis
  
• The amount of land held with planning permission broken down by local authority area and by developer
  
• The amount of land held in strategic land banks broken down by local authority area and by developer
  
• Number of houses completed in each year broken down by local authority area and by developer

The RTPI will be looking to the Callcutt review to provide evidence to properly understand the blockages to housing delivery. In the interim, it is not helpful if any of the parties to this debate – whether they be house builders, the Government, business or environmental lobbies, issue partial and potentially misleading statements about the simple need for more land release. In doing so they can engender a culture of blame for the planning system and planners which merely stultifies wider debates about solutions.

Given that planning permission only lasts for three years, the Government should work closely with house builders and others to identify the blocks that exist within the industry and externally that could lead to those developers with a supply of land with permission much in excess of three years, not being able to achieve the potential of that land if permission lapses.

The Government, working with stakeholders, must review a range of different models to address the house building crisis, which will not improve under the status quo, including the need for a publicly funded house building programme to provide more and genuinely affordable homes.

Latest Government figures show over the past 12 months starts have declined by six per cent to 173,400 while completions have increased by just three per cent to 167,700. Updated Government predictions show 223,000 new households will be formed per year between 2004-2026.