House building delivery is gaining momentum with the NPPF, strategic partnerships with Homes England, announcements signalling greater long term certainty for housing associations and the recognition of the role of local councils through the lifting of the HRA debt cap.
This Forum considered how we can collaboratively plan to continue to boost delivery – of all types and tenures.
Market conditions can often change putting the viability of planning permissions under pressure and sometimes requiring schemes to be re-planned and placed back in the system. Clearly this represents a major challenge when looking at overall housing delivery.
The Housing Delivery Test – part of the revised NPPF published in July 2018 – is one area from which positive change may emanate. This test is intended to highlight areas where numbers of homes built is below target and introduce sanctions to ensure more land is made available.
The scale of sanctions could result in an improvement in delivery. If housing delivery over the previous three years was below 95% of the target, then the local authority would have to publish a Housing Delivery Action Plan by the next year.
Housing associations can also now use the new freedoms and availability of grant through the Homes England Strategic Partnership Programme to rise to the challenges of growing development programmes to meet housing needs.
Strategic partnerships are planned to ensure housing associations increase their rate of house building. To meet government ambition, delivery will have to rise from 65,000 annually to 100,000 (starts by 2022 and completions by 2024).
The certainty of future grant funding will give the confidence to plan into the future for larger schemes and also give the flexibility to switch tenures if needed as schemes come to a conclusion.
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Sponsors:
Contributors:
Mehban Chowdery, Regional Director, London
NHBC
Jeff Astle, Executive Director of Development & Sales
BPHA
Shaun Andrews, Head of Strategic Development
GL Hearn
Ben Denton, Managing Director
L&G Affordable Homes
Read the full report for practical insights and analysis.
You can download it below.