New measures designed to help housebuilders passed into law.
The government hopes that The Housing & Planning Act will give housebuilders and decision-makers the tools and confidence to provide more homes and streamline the planning system to accelerate their delivery.
The measures include underpinning the voluntary Right to Buy agreement with housing associations, supporting the doubling of the number of custom and self-build homes by 2020 and speeding up the neighbourhood planning process.
Housing and Planning Minister Brandon Lewis said: “Our landmark Housing and Planning Act will help anyone who aspires to own their own home achieve their dream. It will increase housing supply alongside home ownership building on the biggest affordable house building program since the 1970s. The act will contribute to transforming generation rent into generation buy, helping us towards achieving our ambition of delivering 1 million new homes.”
According to the government measures in the Act, designed to get the nation building homes faster, will help:
- unlock brownfield land to provide homes faster, requiring local authorities to prepare, maintain and publish local registers of specified land
- support the doubling of the number of custom-built and self-built homes to 20,000 by 2020
- ensure that every area has a local plan
- reform the compulsory purchase process to make it clearer, fairer and faster
- simplify and speed up neighbourhood planning
It also places a duty on local planning authorities to actively promote the development of Starter Homes and embed them in the planning system.
