SPAE - the Society for the Protection of Ascot & Environs, has issued a press release about the recent Government proposals.  In August the UK Government published proposals to overhaul the planning system with the aim of speeding up development and building more new homes.

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick said “These once in a generation reforms will lay the foundations for a brighter future, providing more homes for young people & creating better quality neighbourhoods and homes across the country. We will cut red tape, but not standards, placing a higher regard on quality, design and the environment than before. Planning decisions will be simple & transparent, with local democracy at the heart of the process.”

Most of the attention has centred around the proposed streamlining of the planning process but also announced were new targets for new house building based on a different method of calculating the need. The government intends to set a target of 330,000 new homes to be built each year compared with the current target of 270,000. SPAE is concerned about the possible implications of this because developers currently fall well short of the current target. It is well known in corporate life that if performance to a specific metric is falling considerably short of target the last thing to do is to INCREASE the target and make it HARDER to achieve. We believe that one likely consequence will be for the undesirable feature of so called “landbanking” to increase – where developers sit on land that they have acquired in the hope of achieving higher prices further downstream.

The table below gives an illustration on our local area. This clearly shows that,  not only that the targets have been considerably increased, but RBWM and Bracknell Forest have failed to meet the current targets over the last five years by some margin.

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