More stick, less carrot for local authorities over housing delivery, says NFB

The government should impose penalties on those local authorities who fail to deliver the housing their area needs, according to the National Federation of Builders. 

Responding to publication of the government’s inaugural housing delivery test which showed that 108 local authorities had fallen short of their requirement to build 95% of the homes they needed, the NFB’s chief executive Richard Beresford said ministers had to show some ‘stick’ to bring the councils into line.

“Since the carrot of meeting housing need themselves is not enticing enough for local planners, the government’s stick of penalties and buffers is clearly required,” he added.

Of the 108 councils 87 did not deliver 85% of their requirement and will need to add 20% more homes to their five-year supply of land.

The NFB noted that no area had delivered less than a quarter of the homes they needed in the period 2015 to 2018, meaning no local authority would have to face the “presumption in favour of sustainable development” penalty.

But it said the threshold for this sanction would increase to 45% of need from November this year and 65% in November 2020.

While it said it would prefer local authorities to “be in control of their own housing destiny” the HFB acknowledged that since many were failing to correctly predict their housing needs and were not meeting demand and it welcomed “the blunt instrument that the government is wielding”.

And Rico Wojtulewicz, head of housing and planning policy at the House Builders Association, also warned that councils needed to do a better job of assessing housing need and identifying where homes can be built more quickly or risk facing punitive sanctions.

“If they continue to underestimate demand and focus on large, controversial developments, we expect the housing crisis to worsen and the government to take control from failing councils,” he added.

Paul Smith, managing director of Strategic Land Group, argued the test was not doing the job of calculating housing need. “If a council doesn’t have an up-to-date plan, the delivery test is carried out against housing projections, along with an adjustment for unmet need.

“If the HDT continues to use housing projections as a benchmark, we’ll never break the cycle and the housing crisis will continue to deepen. Under-delivery of new homes will continue to restrict the number of new households that can actually form and reduce future household projections as a result.”