The Government has launched the New Homes Accelerator, a strategic programme intended to ease the impact of damaging bottlenecks in the housing delivery process and is expected to speed up the construction of up to 300,000 new homes in England, currently stalled due to significant regulatory red tape.
The HBA has been recommended such a scheme for almost a decade because something is required to ensure large scale development delivers more quickly, while informing the New Towns ambition. How it takes place will be interesting because if aspiring for immediate success, it would be best used as a catalyst for Homes England to be given greater strategic responsibilities.
The Government outlined the details of this programme, assigning a team from the Ministry of Housing and Homes England to work across government and with local councils, promising to bring together key players, including government agencies, local planning departments, and house builders offering a localised approach and introducing planning experts on the ground to tackle specific barriers at each site.
Where required, greater levels of local planning capacity could be provided where there are barriers and work across the board to make sure planning decisions are made in a timely fashion.
A call for evidence has already been launched calling upon landowners, local authorities and housebuilders to come forward with details of blocked sites that have significant planning issues.
What is most interesting is that the New Homes Accelerator will show the Government what life is really like for the housebuilding industry and why planning is a considerable reason for our housing crisis and growth struggles. Call for evidence is on sites of over 500 homes but the scheme will primarily be focussing on sites over 1,000.
The move also suggests that Ministers understand different site sizes attract different sized builders and different challenges. The hope is that this means the Government will accept HBA NPPF consultation recommendations which support SME housebuilders and organic growth by, among other things, creating a new, ‘Medium’ site size definition of between ten and fifty homes, which would sit between the existing ‘Minor’ (fewer than 10) and ‘Major’ (10 and above) definitions and having a rolling small and medium sized call for sites document.
