Clearing the ground for the new Jerusalem

The Queen’s Speech includes two bills that will impact on the government’s capacity to meet their housing objectives — one to reform the planning system once again and one on housing and regeneration, which is aimed at restructuring the agencies that support investment and regulate social housing provision.

The Planning Bill mainly concentrates on how to speed up the planning process for major infrastructure projects. However, it also includes further measures to improve the general town and country planning system. This system has been in continual flux over the last few years — aimed at streamlining the system but often simply adding further uncertainties and requirements. The Speech points to further changes in the local development plan process — only set in place a couple of years ago — and introduces the possibility of local authorities deciding minor appeals. This is defined as deregulation — but has the potential simply to add another set of complications and targets.

Presumably this Bill will also clarify how the gaping hole left by the Treasury putting planning gain supplement on the shelf is to be filled. The proposed tariff structure raises far more issues than it solves, particularly with respect to the priority to be given to affordable housing. This is not mentioned in the background materials to the Bill.

The Housing and Regeneration Bill takes forward the restructuring of the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships into a single investment body — now to be renamed the Housing and Communities Agency (H&C) rather than the originally proposed Communities England. The agency’s focus will be on ensuring that both infrastructure and housing are developed within a coherent framework and to allocate central government grants where appropriate.

At the same time, regulation is to be separated from investment — the major recommendation made by Professor Cave in his independent review of social housing regulation. A new Office for Tenants and Social Landlords is to be set up, initially to take over the Housing Corporation’s regulatory role. This has the potential, over a two year period, to bring the regulation of housing associations, local authorities and other social providers — including private developers — under the same regulatory procedures and refocuses that regulation more on the tenant’s experience than on providers’. In the longer term this might also enable the reorganisation of the currently very messy and ineffective regulation of private sector management. In this context, it is to be hoped that legislation will be brought forward to enable the introduction of standard tenancy contracts across all tenures, although again this is not mentioned in the background materials.

The main thrust of the Housing and Regeneration Bill is to enable an expansion in the housebuilding programme to levels not seen since the 1960s. The Bill supports three distinct investment initiatives:

• facilitating the use of disused and surplus public land — owned by central government, agencies and local authorities — to provide at least an additional 200,000 homes by 2016. Fifty per cent of these are intended to be designated as affordable homes for social rent, first time buyers and key workers;

• making the necessary changes to existing legislation to facilitate a number of eco-towns where it is intended to build to zero-carbon standards by 2016 as well as to meet higher environmental standards more generally. While these are heralded as being the first new towns for the last 50 years, their scale is likely to be far smaller, indeed more like large, mixed community estates;

• changes in the regulatory and financial framework to make it easier for local authorities directly to build council housing again. This is most likely to be achieved through existing arms length management organisations. An alterative approach will be a partnership between local authorities and local housing corporations which will have site-specific master planning and delivery responsibilities.

Christine Whitehead, Professor of Housing, London School of Economics; and Director of CCHPR, University of Cambridge.