Are housing targets good or bad?
As a new WhatsApp controversy within the Tory party puts housebuilding targets in the limelight, Elena Siniscalco asks whether central targets mean more homes or fewer
A Tory insurrection on housebuilding targets – waged, where else, through WhatsApp – has put the subject under the spotlight once again. As Conservative MPs accuse their own government of “short-termism” for scrapping the target of 300,000 new homes a year, it’s worth digging a little deeper and asking whether targets are actually good or bad, overall.
The Conservative target was dismissed by the government last December, after Rishi Sunak admitted many of his MPs were against it. Back then, he explained his choice at PMQs by saying he wanted decisions on building new homes “to be taken locally, with greater say for local communities rather than distant bureaucrats”. By scrapping the national target, he effectively passed the buck on to local planning authorities.
Some Conservative MPs are indeed strongly opposed to the concept of housing targets.
Liz Truss once went as far as calling them “Stalinist”. Michael Gove, secretary for levelling up, housing and communities, justified Sunak’s decision in aesthetic terms – by claiming that an alternative strategy without the target would ensure new homes are more “beautiful” and the local environment is protected.
Yet the government could have gone down a more moderate avenue instead of ditching targets altogether. Bartek Staniszewski, a researcher at Conservative think tank Bright Blue, says we should be cautious about one-size-fits-all, centrally-set targets. Staniszewski thinks a more flexible set of targets could have worked out.
“Central housing targets should be sensitive to the needs of local communities”, he says, adding that authorities in different regions should be allowed to build a different number of homes based on local affordability, local incomes and other similar factors.
According to Rico Wojtulewicz, head of housing and planning policy at the National Federation of Builders, housing targets were pivotal in increasing the supply of new houses. “The government’s claim that it built more homes than Labour is based on the fact it introduced targets and penalties”, says Wojtulewicz.
So Sunak’s decision is not only going to mean fewer new homes delivered, but it will also hurt the smaller players in the market, according to Wojtulewicz. Without the target there is less onus on deliverability, so “large sites with politically expedient, uncertain delivery timeframes are favoured versus smaller ones that SMEs typically offer for local plan allocations”, he says.
David Smith, head of property litigation at JMW Solicitors, acknowledges that centrally set targets are “always a challenge” for the local governments that have to then implement them. Yet they are also a “way to drive housebuilding”, he concedes.
The decision to let local authorities take more independent decisions on housebuilding has been praised by some who say it puts power back into the hands of local communities – which was one of Gove’s alleged main missions.
Yet it also politicises the planning process – with local authorities now having to directly engage with locals unhappy about new developments. Knowing how frustrated some residents can become, and without binding targets to hold them to account, they might be disincentivised from building new homes.