White paper to emphasise high-rise and city-centre building and include plans for councils to forecast housing needs

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Councils will be ordered to build thousands more homes, with an emphasis on high-rise blocks and city-centre developments, as part of the government’s housing strategy.



Too few councils have plans to meet the unprecedented housing demand, the government will say, with 40% of local planning authorities lacking an adequate plan for building new homes to meet the projected growth in household numbers.

New centralised standards will be set for local councils to project their future housing needs, with the expectation that the plans will be reviewed every five years. The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) did not respond to requests for information on how cash-strapped councils would finance the projections to meet the new standards.

Introducing the housing white paper to be released on Tuesday, the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, confirmed the government’s key shift away from primarily trying to help people buy homes, saying he accepted many were able only to rent.

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“I accept that it shouldn’t all be about ownership, that some people do want to, by choice, rent, and we should be making sure that we’re looking at all types of tenancies – ownership, rental, whatever it is,” Javid told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Seeking to prioritise one form of ownership over another was “a false choice”, he said. “The reality is we need more homes, whether to rent or buy.”

Javid said: “The fact is we haven’t been building enough houses for decades under successive governments.”

He added: “I think it’s the greatest barrier to social progress in Britain today.”

The number of households who own their own homes has fallen by 200,000 since 2010, with the number of under-35s owning their homes falling by 344,000. Almost a million more households are now renting from private landlords since the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition came to power.

Javid said that while building on green belt land would remain possible with the correct approvals, this was not a priority, especially given the green belt comprised just 13% of land in England.

“In other words there’s lots of land out there that is not green belt, and it’s right that we continue to prioritise that,” he said. Instead, he argued, the focus should be on brownfield sites, and increased housing density.

The white paper will also cut the period within which developers have to start building after obtaining planning permission, from three years to two.

The DCLG said the plans would tackle “the serious and growing gap between the number of planning permissions granted and the number of new homes completed”. A source in the department added that identifying housing requirements was particularly complex, lacked transparency but councils would be consulted on a new approach.

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The shadow housing minister, John Healey, told Today that after seven years of Conservative government and “hundreds” of announcements, the number of homeowners had fallen by 200,000, while more and more young people were sleeping rough.

“There is just a huge gap between the rhetoric of Tory ministers and their record on housing,” he said. “We’ve certainly got to do more on all fronts, and we did this over 13 years as a Labour government.”

Among Labour’s policies, Healey said, would be to build more affordable homes, and to offer a “charter” for tenants, with long-term leases and regular, pegged rent rises.

The housing minister, Gavin Barwell, also promised over the weekend that the white paper would include incentives for older people to sell big family homes and plans for more sheltered housing schemes.

Building more homes, close to city centres and transport hubs, is the only way to halt the decline in affordability, Javid will say. Key proposals in the white paper will include:

Requiring councils to publish “realistic” projections for future housing demands and review them every five years.

A drive for developers to “build higher” where there is a shortage of land, especially in areas close to key public transport hubs.

Slashing the timescales for housebuilding, including requiring developers to start building within two years, rather than three.



Plans to force more transparency on developers, who will be required to show how quickly they will start new developments.



New measures will also be considered to protect buyers from so-called “leasehold abuse” where punishing ground rent and service charges increase during the lease period, traded with leaseholders left powerless to influence the costs.

Renters who cannot afford to save for a deposit must be given a wider choice, the white paper will say. The government plans to relax restrictions on funding for the affordable homes programme, originally designed for shared ownership building, so developers can build homes for rentals, including rent to buy schemes.

Planning rules will be overhauled so councils can plan to build more long-term homes for rent and there will be measures to encourage landlords to offer more stable, longer-term tenancies.

The white paper also outlines plans to break the dominance of some developers, in a marketplace where 10 companies build 60% of new homes.

The £3bn homebuilding fund, previously announced by Javid at the Conservative party conference last year, would provide loans to small developers, custom builders and offsite construction with the aim of diversifying the market, DCLG said.