Brownfield Land

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)]

The coalition Government are determined to make the very best use of derelict land and former industrial sites to help provide the homes this country desperately needs, in a way that protects our valued countryside. Further to the Mansion House speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on Thursday 12 June and my written ministerial statement of 10 June 2014, Official Report, column 33WS, I would like to set out for hon. Members more information on the Government’s plans to increase house building on brownfield land.

Councils will play a critical role in bringing forward suitable unused and previously developed land. They will consult on and put in place local development orders, which are a flexible, proactive way to provide outline planning permission for the scale and type of housing that can be built on sites. This will provide greater certainty for both builders and local residents, helping developers to work up suitable schemes and ultimately speeding up the building of new homes. Our aim is to see permissions in place on more than 90% of suitable brownfield sites by 2020—which could provide up to 200,000 new homes.

We are providing a £5 million fund, to be launched before the summer, to support the first wave of new local development orders; we will also be providing a set of local development order “templates” for smaller brownfield sites, and will consult on other measures to underpin this programme later in the year. The Mayor of London will be given new powers to drive forward local development orders in the capital. But this drive for planning permissions will retain key safeguards—as with any planning application, councils will need to take account of the views of local people when preparing an order, as well as environmental issues like minimising flood risk.

In addition, 20 new housing zones on this brownfield land in London will benefit from £400 million funding from the Government and the Greater London Authority. A further 10 zones outside London will be supported by an additional £200 million of Government funding for remediation and infrastructure to deliver new housing development. The Government funding will be in the form of recoverable investment. The London bidding prospectus was published on Friday 13 June by the Mayor and the Government will publish a prospectus inviting bids for housing zones in the rest of England shortly.

As well as making the best use of brownfield land, we also want to ensure that existing housing estates in need of large-scale regeneration get the attention they deserve. In addition to improving the quality of properties, it also has the potential to deliver additional new homes on existing land. On Friday, I published a prospectus outlining how developers can bid for a share of a £150 million loan fund to invest in kick-starting and accelerating the regeneration of some of the country’s most deprived social housing estates.

These measures, taken together with our existing policies and initiatives, will remove obstacles to developing suitable brownfield sites, ensuring that we focus on building the new homes we need while protecting the green spaces we all value.