Housing secretary Robert Jenrick has published proposals for more changes to the planning system to encourage more house-building in town centres and above railway stations.
Next month the government will launch a register of brownfield sites. This will map out unused land as part of plans to encourage councils to get this land developed first. Developers wanting to demolish vacant commercial, industrial and residential buildings and replace them with housing homes will get fast-track planning, under the proposals being consulted on by the housing ministry.
All local authorities will also be required to have up-to-date local plans in place by December 2023, or risk government intervention. The changes come ahead a planning white paper, expected in the next few weeks, building on previously announced proposals for a ‘fast track for beauty’.
In the budget this week the chancellor of the exchequer outlined new funding for an extension of the Affordable Homes Programme with a new, multi-year settlement of £12bn, plus more than £1bn of allocations from the Housing Infrastructure Fund to build nearly 70,000 new homes in high demand areas across the country. Further details of this are available in a document called Planning for the Future.