Rayner vows to build more social homes in party conference speech
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has pledged to “reverse the tide” of falling social housing numbers, in a speech given this week during the Labour party conference in Liverpool.
Rayner also added that her party would build more social homes than are lost “within the first financial year of this Labour government”, with Labour’s “new planning framework” unlocking more affordable homes and providing “the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation”.
The Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary also said that her predecessor Michael Gove had returned almost £2bn to the Treasury in unspent housing funds, and said that the previous Government had “failed to meet their targets year after year”.
The simple aspiration of a safe, secure and affordable home is further out of reach than ever and we can’t go on like this.
Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister
So change must begin at home. We are tackling the Tories’ housing emergency.
The Labour government also set out a policy paper introducing a “brownfield passport”, which would see some sites achieving default approval if they met certain design and quality standards.
The news comes as a survey commissioned by Landsec, British Land and Berkeley found that almost 80% of people felt that urban regeneration would have a positive impact on their area.
The survey – of 1,829 individuals across Cambridge, Camden, Manchester and Newham – also found that 60% of respondents viewed undeveloped brownfield sites as “ugly, dirty and unsafe”, with 75% perceiving underdeveloped brownfield land as “wasted potential”.
Meanwhile, Matthew Pennycook, Minister of State for Housing, has told conference attendees that the delivery of new homes is currently “over-reliant on a handful of volume builders”.
Speaking on the second day of the Liverpool conference, Pennycook said that the industry needed to diversify, adding: “there’s no way we’ll build enough homes in this country without getting many more SMEs involved, and we’ve got to give them the support they need to do so.”
Planning permissions hit an 11-year low
The number of homes granted planning permission in the year to June fell by -15% to 231,000 against the previous year, according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).
The figure represents the lowest annual rate since 191,000 homes were granted permission in 2013, and a -31% decrease on the 336,000 homes approved in the year to June 2019.
The news comes after a recent Home Builders Federation report found that just over 230,000 homes achieved approval in the last year – the lowest figure for any 12-month period in the last ten years.
Skills England report calls for MMC expansion
The first report published by Skills England – a new arms-length body set up to bring together key partners to meet the skills needs of the next decade – has said that the adoption of modern methods of construction would have to “expand considerably” to have an impact on labour shortages in the industry.
The report, titled Driving growth and widening opportunities, also flagged that the UK construction industry has “lagged behind that of other countries and other sectors of the UK economy”.
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