Planning rules to be relaxed to create more city centre housing

The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove, has set out plans for regeneration and increased delivery of housing, including inner-city "densification" in England by relaxing the planning rules even further, which will make it easier to convert empty retail premises into flats and houses.

The proposed regeneration plans involve 20 projects that would be deployed, among other places, in Cambridge, inner-city London and central Leeds. The ambitious plans involve:

• supporting the development of new housing as well as cutting-edge laboratories and commercial spaces in Cambridge;
• regenerate the Leeds city centre and improve its transport infrastructure;
• deployment of 65,000 homes across multiple sites in London, including Thamsmead, Beckton and Silvertown;
• work closely with local partners in Barrow-in-Furness, to help make it a new powerhouse of the North – extending beyond its current boundaries with thousands of new homes and space for new businesses to benefit from the scientific and technical expertise already clustered there;
• invest £800 million from the £1.5 billion Brownfield Infrastructure and Land fund to provide 56,000 new homes across England, which aims to transform disused sites and create "vibrant communities for people to live and work".

The proposed plans aim to "unblock the bottleneck in the planning system" which is viewed as an obstacle to providing affordable housing and stopping growth and investment. That proposal involves:

• investing £24 million for a Planning Skills Delivery Fund to clear planning backlogs and get the right skills in place;
• establishing a new "super squad" of planners and other experts to work across the planning system to unblock major housing developments; and
• increasing the amount that developers pay in planning fees, to ensure all planning departments have all the resources they may need.

As a part of the plan, the Secretary of State wanted to make it easier to convert shops, takeaways and betting shops into homes.

However, the Local Government Association has warned that certain spaces such as offices, shops and barns are not always suitable for housing and may result in the creation of poor quality homes. On top of that, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire Anthony Browne has responded: "I will do everything I can to stop the government's nonsense plans to impose mass housebuilding on Cambridge, where all major developments are now blocked by the Environment Agency because we have quite literally run out of water".

These plans build on the commitment made by the Conservative party in their 2019 manifesto that they will build one million new homes by the end of Parliament. The government had also an additional target to build 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s, but that target was never met.

For more information on this subject, see:

• Consultation on Permitted Development Rights.