We’ve been building since 1886 – the planning system is the worst it’s ever been
Delays in the UK planning system – down to brick colour and tile choices – are stalling housing delivery. We need 3,000 new planners and faster approvals to meet national housing goals and boost economic growth, says Tim Roberts
When Britain is in the midst of a housing crisis you don’t, as a house builder, expect to have to go to a planning appeal over the colour of bricks or the types of tile being used in a new development.
These are the small but important details that should be ironed out quickly after a planning permission has been granted, but at Henry Boot we are finding that these ‘reserved matters’ are clogging up a system which the government is rightly desperate to improve.
Amazingly, we have found ourselves launching appeals for non-determination – when a local council fails to decide on an issue within a reasonable time – on the colour of bricks and types of tile because the planning system just cannot cope.
From our Sheffield base, Henry Boot has been building since 1886 – and by 1914 our founder was using his six trucks and 20 horse-drawn carts to deliver government contracts to support the war effort, building army barracks, aerodromes and sea plane bases.
Mr Boot, his son Charles, who built Pinewood Studios in the 1930s, and the generations that succeeded him must be turning in their graves because the planning system today is more dysfunctional now than at any time in history.
London is especially bad
While this is a nationwide problem, the situation in London is particularly acute, with a combination of the sclerotic planning system and post-Grenfell cladding red tape leading to starts on new homes in the capital plunging to levels last seen in 2009 following the Financial Crisis. Indeed in the first quarter of 2025 a staggering 23 out of 33 London boroughs saw no starts on homes at all.
This is hugely frustrating, because the government has made some bold steps to fix the planning system. It has reversed Conservative housing secretary Michael Gove’s December 2023 decision to remove local authority housing targets – and there is now a far stronger presumption in favour of development around the country.
In our trading update on 22 May, we said that this change of approach had led in the first quarter of 2025 to Henry Boot winning planning appeals against original refusals on 647 housing plots across three sites, including in Sutton-in-Ashfield and Nottinghamshire and Yalding, Kent.
We have active appeals on six further sites totalling 2,600 plots and having anticipated changes and increased resources within our team we are accelerating numerous planning applications with the target of submitting up to 15,000 plots over the next two years to deliver much-needed homes across the United Kingdom.
But achieving those planning consents is only half the battle won, because ‘outline’ permission in principle has to be followed by ‘detailed’ consent, which is where the details of the colour of those bricks and the types of tiles has to be thrashed out.
Securing this detailed planning consent before the Covid pandemic took around six months. Now it can take up to three years, which is as long as it takes to build and complete the development.
It is crazy that it takes as long to secure the detailed planning consent as it takes to dig the foundations, lay the bricks, add the roof, install central heating and electricity and provide the roads.
The real problem for housebuilders of all types is that they invariably need to borrow money to buy land and then have to spend years paying interest on these loans before recouping any of their investment by selling homes, making the whole venture far more risky.
This is one reason why volume housebuilders now build 75-80 per cent of new homes – with small and medium-sized enterprises accounting for the remainder – whereas the reverse was the case before the Second World War.
There are answers, though. The British Property Federation, in its Plan for Growth, has called for the recruitment and deployment of 3,000 extra planners to support the English planning system over the next five years.
These extra planners would embed the gains afforded by the government’s planning reform and guidance and would also ensure that opportunities resulting from devolution and local government reorganisation are fully realised.
It cannot be a coincidence that the whole system has slowed down so much amidst widespread working from home
These 3,000 planners could be part-funded through the use of efficiency savings from council re-organisation and enhanced contributions from developers, who in most cases will be happy to pay.
I also support anything government can do to encourage council staff back to the office, because it cannot be a coincidence that the whole system has slowed down so much amidst widespread working from home.
This would also chime with the private sector where there is already a clear move back to the office in pursuit of increased productivity.
The government has done a good job so far in putting into place the principles of planning reform.
Now it needs to act to speed up delivery if it is to meet its target of 1.5m new homes during the current Parliament, providing a new generation with the opportunity to own their first home and to boost an economy that is locked in a low-growth cycle.
Tim Roberts is chief executive of Henry Boot