Best laid plans

You can never plan the future by the past

Depending on your point of view, you can get media validation for whatever you believe if you look hard enough and choose the right paper/website/radio show. A quick type of the sentence “Rayner planning reform December 2024” into the search string of Google this morning and these are the headlines that immediately popped up:

• Major overhaul of planning committees to get Britain building: Gov.uk
• Rayner reveals planning reforms aimed at boosting housing supply: Property Investor Today
• Government to ride ‘roughshod’ over local planning rules: The Negotiator
• Planning reforms will end development chaos, says Rayner: BBC
• Rayner set to relax planning rules for sites already included in local plans: Leatherhead Living
• Angela Rayner to unveil plans to drop rules for new homes to be beautiful: iNews
• Housebuilders and planners welcome Rayner’s plan: Housing Today
• Rayner to allow building on area of green belt bigger than Surrey: The Times
• Rayner declares war on NIMBYs with sweeping planning reforms: Estate Agent Today
• Rayner to force councillors to undergo ‘planning training’: Landlord Today
• Councils will be BANNED from blocking loft extensions and extra storeys: Daily Mail

You can tell that last one is from the Daily Mail by the use of Upper Case for the word “banned”, to ensure that the readership really understands what it is that they need to be foaming at the mouth about today.

The promise to sort out the delays in the planning system, and free-up builders to build the homes the country needs was writ large in the Labour Party manifesto, so this should come as no surprise. Neither should the Times article about encroaching on the green belt. Politicians, national and local have long had the habit of asking such questions, in such a way that they get the answer they were after, and the permission they are seeking (Tunbridge Wells Borough Council LTN idealists and cycling evangelists, I’m looking at you). So, inevitably, the ‘grey belt’ of unlovely plots within the wider green belt, the potential building upon of which was met with some acceptance, will now encroach upon those parts of a far greener hue.

In theory, all this should be good news for this sector, not just construction, but this particular part of the wider industry. A boost to new housebuilding will sell more building materials, will, in theory, generate more housing transactions which will boost more RMI spend…yada, yada, yada. Residential housing development is lagging behind the rest of the construction industry, certainly if you delve deeper than the headline figures.

The Construction PMI for November, for example, shows a “robust upturn in UK construction output”, but this blurs the fact that residential housing development construction has fallen behind for two months in a row, and that November’s decline was the fastest seen since the Summer.

Freeing up log-jams in the planning system is only one of the issues that will limit the scope of the Government’s plans. Those 1,5million homes aren’t going to build themselves. With a skills shortage that’s getting worse with every retirement party, who’s going to build those houses? And, with housebuilders only wanting to build homes that they know they can sell, who’s going to buy them? That’s a whole other issue.