“Key measures announced today include the launch of a new £3 billion Home Building Fund to help small and “custom” builders deliver 25,500 homes by 2020.
This will be used to unlock a pipe line of up to 200,000 homes over the longer term – with the emphasis on development on brownfield land.”
1. It will not stop land banking or developers dribbling out new houses to keep prices up.
2. Large builders will now create small offshoots to sponge up the money.
3. DEFINITELY no social or truly-affordable houses.
4. So far, no help for low and mid-income people to truly be able to afford deposits and mortgages without the bank of mum and dad.
5. Many of the new homes will probably be buy-to-let.
6. No INSISTENCE on brownfield sites, just am ” emphasis”.
Nice one. Just 25,000 more houses … a drop in the ocean …
East Devon Watch 
Oh dear. Just when will the Tories realise that sticking plaster fixes like this do not address the underlying issues. And that subsidies don’t alter the underling economics.
As the Owl points out, the real issues are that developers are actually encouraged to landbank rather than build and that what is needed is to change the underlying financial structures to make it an incentive to build rather than to landbank.
So, making them pay council-tax or a new land-bank tax from the point of planning permission would be one-way. (The consequence of this might, however, be simply to stop seeking planning permission – but at the moment they benefit from being able to use the increased value of the land after gaining PP to boost their balance sheet and / or support borrowing – so there would undoubtedly be a downside for delaying getting PP.)
Another way would be to make them pay their CIL / S106 payments as soon as they get PP – which would unlock a lot of dormant payments for local councils to use in the short-term.
Or, we could allow local housing associations to compulsory purchase banked land at the same price paid by the developer – which would mean that either the developer or a housing association would build homes on it – so a win-win.
Or we could redefine the definition of “affordable” housing – to that “affordable” actually means affordable. Developers would still need to offer a proportion of affordable housing, but the price would be linked to e.g. the minimum wage. Perhaps 10,000 x Minimum Wage per hour for a 2 bedroom apartment and 20,000 x for a 3-bedroom semi.
Oh – and the law needs to be changed so that developers cannot go back after grant of PP to negotiate a lower level of affordable housing. This is a really bad law as it stands, because it encourages developers to promise lots in order to get PP in the first place, in the knowledge that they can later claim poverty and negotiate a lower level of affordable housing once they have got PP. The whole point of leaving development to the private sector is that it should be the private sector who own the financial risks – but the law as it stands now allows them to pass that risk back to the local council / community and to “game” the system.
But since the Conservatives outsourced the creation of the current Planning Policy (NPPF) to developers – which is equivalent to allowing poachers to define the process by which gamekeepers have to agree to allow them to poach – and since the Conservatives are very chummy indeed with developers, who make generous donations to the political party as well – don’t expect the Conservatives to do anything sensible which might hurt developers’ profits.
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