Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps the Government is taking to ensure that housing developers build on land allocated through local plans.

The National Planning Policy Framework is clear that strategic policies within local plans should set out an overall strategy for the pattern, scale and quality of development, and make sufficient provision for housing. Such policies should, as a minimum, provide for objectively assessed needs for housing (and other uses). In addition, local planning authorities should identify and update annually a supply of specific deliverable sites sufficient to provide a minimum of five years’ worth of housing against their housing requirement set out in adopted strategic policies. Up to date plans and a five-year supply of housing land provide the best protection for local communities against speculative planning applications. The Government has set a deadline of December 2023 for all authorities to have up-to-date Local Plans in place.

The Government wants to see homes built faster and expects house builders to deliver more homes, more quickly and to a high-quality standard. New homes should be built out as soon as possible once planning permission is granted. We are clear that where sites are stalled or experiencing delays to delivery, it is for local authorities and developers to work closely together at a local level to overcome these barriers. The Planning for the Future White Paper also proposes that growth areas in local plans would benefit from an automatic grant of outline consent. This will ensure that developers, authorities and communities can have greater clarity at an early stage of the process about the expectations for development and reduce unnecessary delays as those developments progress.