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Conservative ministers in the UK are unlikely to deliver 300,000 new homes per year after making the target advisory rather than mandatory, MPs have warned.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak decided in December to make the target advisory rather than mandatory as he looked to see off a potential Conservative backbench rebellion.
The Levelling Up, Housing & Communities Committee, in a report published on Friday, said its inquiry into the policy change had seen it told that the six-figure target would be ‘impossible to achieve’.
Clive Betts, the Labour chair of the cross-party panel of MPs, said the downgrade of the target’s status was ‘already having a damaging impact on efforts to increase the building of new homes’.
The 44-page report, Reforms to National Planning Policy, states that the government has not provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate how the policy of scrapping mandatory local housing targets will directly lead to more housebuilding.
MPs said that, while the government is on track to deliver one million new homes over the course of the current Parliament, it is not forecast to deliver 300,000 net new homes per year by the mid-2020s.
‘The government’s reform proposals include making local housing targets advisory and removing the need for local authorities to continually demonstrate a deliverable five-year housing land supply,’ the report says.
‘We have heard evidence from many stakeholders that these measures will render the national housing target impossible to achieve.’
Clive Betts, the Labour chair of the Commons committee, said: ‘We have a national shortage of housing in England and there’s evidence the government’s latest shake-up of planning rules is already having a damaging impact on efforts to increase the building of new homes.
‘People are facing rising housing costs. Housing affordability is a major issue.
‘For our economy and for communities across the country, it’s crucial the government takes urgent action to encourage the building of more homes.
‘Without urgent action, the government will fail to achieve its national housing target of building 300,000 net new homes per year by the mid-2020s.
‘Planning consultants say annual housebuilding will go down to around 150,000 a year under the government’s proposed policy reforms.
‘The prospect of a major hit to the building of new homes resulting from the government’s planning rule changes is deeply concerning, especially for people wanting to get on the housing ladder, families eager to move home, and communities crying out for affordable places to live.’
The committee said ministers had promised to publish its own analysis of December’s decision but that it had been delayed after originally being due in spring.
Housing Secretary Michael Gove told the Local Government Association’s conference last week that the UK Government remained ‘committed’ to delivering 300,000 houses annually.
Gove said emphasis needed to be on the quality of homes, not just the quantity.
He highlighted how UK housing targets were met in the 1950s but that some of that stock were ‘now affected by damp, by mould and by dilapidation that actually puts people’s lives at risk’.
source: PA
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