Planning officers will be able to bypass council committees to approve appropriate homes, according to deputy prime minister and housing secretary Angela Rayner.
Writing for The Sunday Telegraph, Rayner stated that “unblocking the clogged-up planning system means providing greater certainty to developers that good quality schemes aligned with democratically agreed local development plans will be approved in a timely manner”.
She wrote that her government would “overhaul” local planning committees, which would allow planning officers “to make more decisions to speed up the approvals process” and ensure homes are built.
Planning officers will be able to consent to applications that meet design quality criteria and local plans without committee permission.
But, Rayner added, residents should be assured that those developments that do not follow the criteria would be “subject to appropriate democratic scrutiny”.
Local authorities, Rayner wrote, “must play their full part in getting spades in the ground because we all must do our bit to build the homes we need”.
She reiterated local councils’ duty to adopt local plans. “The question is where the homes and the local services that people expect alongside them get built, not whether homes are built at all.”
Rayner’s piece and the government’s plans follow prime minister Keir Starmer’s “Plan for Change” speech last Thursday, reconfirming the government’s target of delivering 1.5 million homes in this parliament. The plans also come ahead of the publication of the government’s updated National Planning Policy Framework, which Rayner said in her Sunday Telegraph article would be this week.
Rayner acknowledged that she and the PM were “making tough decisions”. But she added: “The impact of inaction is not something we can stomach.
"Every couple who can’t afford to move in together and start a longed-for family suffers. Every parent who draws down a chunk of carefully saved pension to get a child on the housing ladder suffers. Every thirty-something who is still sharing a rented house with strangers suffers too. It can’t go on.”
