Councils being ‘set up to fail’ by new housing targets, says West Sussex local authority

Local councils are being “set up to fail” by new housing targets, according to leaders from all parties in a West Sussex local authority.

A letter from Arun District Council slammed the government’s planned amendments to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), saying they would be “catastrophic” for their local area if implemented.

Shortly after coming into office in July this year, the new Labour government announced it would be overhauling the NPPF, the latest version of which had only recently been published by former housing secretary Michael Gove.

Labour’s proposed changes would make housing targets mandatory again and introduce a new standard method for calculating them, which will result in higher targets for all areas except London and see the national target rise to 370,000 homes per year.

Arun’s letter said Labour’s reforms rested on “the premise that the planning system is solely responsible for the shortfall in housing delivery”, which it said was not true.

“It is abundantly clear that the shortfall is not due to an insufficient number of planning permissions being granted by the authority, but conversely due to the rate at which residential permissions are being built out by the development industry,” it said.

The district council group leaders said that in Arun itself, there were roughly 8,000 granted planning permissions waiting to be implemented.

Arun said the proposed NPPF would punish council “for matters completely outside their control” and suggested that penalties should instead be applied to developers sitting on permissions.

The local authority also criticised the assumption that higher targets would increase delivery rates, saying that it ignored market absorption rates and wrongly assumed developers would flood the market with homes even if it reduced their profit margins - a notion it described as “risible at best”.

According to the council, the NPPF would ultimately see its annual housing target rise from 1,342 to 1,691. Completions in recent years have averaged a little more than 700.

>>See also: The ins and outs of Labour’s new National Planning Policy Framework

“The proposed figures are totally unrealistic and will not be achieved,” it said. 

“The required new figure will mean that Arun will effectively have to demonstrate a deliverable housing supply of six years which will undoubtedly prove insurmountable and thus the local authority is simply being set up to fail. 

It further observed that housing development in Arun was constrained by the South Downs National Park to the north, the sea to the south, and extensive areas of low-lying, flood-prone coastal plain.

It comes weeks after the leader of Bath and North East Somerset Council wrote to Angela Rayner complaining that the targets for that area were “unrealistic”.

Kevin Guy’s letter said the proposed housing targets “are a relatively crude calculation based on existing housing stock, affordability and economic potential”.

A MHCLG spokesperson said: “We are in a housing crisis so all areas of the country must play their part in ending it by building the homes we need.

“We will work in partnership with councils to deliver 1.5 million homes over the next five years, and our new housing targets better respond to affordability pressures to ensure homes are built where they are needed most.”