Key points:
  • The Standard Method will calculate need based on how affordable housing is, rather than how much may be required due to growth forecasts.
  • 6-year rather than 5-year housing supply for existing local plans.
  • Presumption if favour of development where applications are policy compliant.
  • £100m, alongside increased planning fees, to increase LPA capacity.
  • New definition of greenbelt, but no 50% affordable target on ‘grey belt’ land.

The long-awaited changes to the NPPF have today been published. Building, no pun intended, on the new Government’s commitment to deliver growth across this Parliament with a new ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes, there are some noticeable changes. The publication of these changes before Christmas, after the consultation in August received more than 10,000 responses, is no small feat and demonstrates the Government’s efforts to make-up time lost by the Summer and Conference recesses.

To the shock of absolutely no one, mandatory housing targets are back, with a rise from 300,000 to a new target of 370,000 homes a year. There has been speculation for some time whether the issue of housing delivery is a consequence of England’s sluggish planning system. The announcement of £100m of funding to help local authorities recruit 300 new planning officers will be welcome news, with many local authorities struggling to meet capacity when they have allocated a senior planning officer to work on a large development application. Large applications take a considerable amount of planning officers’ time.

The announcement that local authorities will need to progress local plans within three months, considering just one-third of local authorities adopted a local plan in the last 5 years, could result in a rush by many councils to get their new plans underway, particularly as those with old plans after July 2026 will need to demonstrate an extra year housing supply, 6 instead of the usual 5-year.

Whilst the NPPF still insists that brownfield land remains a priority for redevelopment, these new changes will require councils to review their green belt boundaries and identify ‘grey belt’ land. For local authorities which are located within large portions of green belt, who have previously adopted Local Plans with low numbers of new housing, this change will enable them to allocate land for development to meet the new housing targets as many local authorities such as those in the Home Counties have been hit with much higher targets under the revised calculations. When compared to the housing numbers announced at the start of the consultation, the changes are most notable in London and the South East, with Kensington and Chelsea seeing a 20% increase, Wandsworth 13% increase, Westminster 14% increase, and a 10% increase in Mole Valley.

The release of grey belt land will be welcome news to many within the industry, particularly when areas with considerable green belt are the very same areas where housing is most unaffordable. However, the August consultation proposed a target of 50% affordable housing for any new developments on green belt land, but this commitment has been dropped. The Government’s ambition to deliver up to 50% affordable housing on developments remains, but it has been watered down for grey belt sites to provide flexibility through a 15% target premium on top of local plan numbers, up to 50%. This again will be welcomed by the sector, after uproar in August was publicly spearheaded by Barratt’s Land and Planning Director Phil Barnes who highlighted that the developer had already mothballed three applications due to “the spectre of 50%”.

The standard method, used by local authorities to calculate housing need for their local plans, will now consider how affordable housing is within an area, rather than population projections and the specific needs of the area. This will likely result in higher housing numbers in areas, but it is yet unclear how this will translate into aiding housing delivery.

As always, we will need to wait and see how these changes may help to deliver the housing that England desperately needs but with over 1 million homes consented but not yet built, according to The Planning Portal Market Index, the issue with delivery may have more to do with a labour and skills shortage than supply.