We received a petition asking:
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to suspend regional housing targets determined through the Regional Spatial Strategy, empowering local councils instead to set their own targets based on local, sustainable housing needs assessments and consultation with local communities.”
Details of Petition:
“Regional housing targets are widely felt to be an inadequate mechanism for delivering the appropriate numbers, mix and location for new housing outside London. My petition calls upon Government to suspend the current top-down imposition of excessive housing targets through the Regional Spatial Strategy and instead to empower local councils to set their own targets based on local needs assessments and consultation with local communities. Local councils could either work alone where appropriate, or in clusters as part of multi-area agreements or existing sub-regional partnerships.”
· Read the petition
· Petitions homepage
Read the Government’s response
The Government does not agree with the proposition that regional housing targets determined through Regional Spatial Strategy (RSS) should be suspended.
The Government is committed to regional planning and allocation of housing numbers to the district level through the existing RSS system. The RSS system plays the following key roles:
Regional Spatial Strategies (RSS) inform the strategic development of our regions.
This form of strategic planning has to be carried out at the appropriate spatial scale, which is the region; the planning issues addressed by the RSS cannot be adequately dealt with at the local or county spatial scale.
Each RSS addresses major planning issues such as the number and distribution of housing within a region and supporting infrastructure, major transport decisions etc.
This provides the strategic planning context in which each Local Authority can with confidence create its Local Development Framework (LDF).
Without the RSS our Local Authorities would be expected to create their local plans within a planning policy vacuum and would not have the confidence to know that their planning policies would be capable of delivering sustainable development.
Just as important, the RSS provides the vehicle by which a region can reflect the real human geography of their sub-regions, covering housing market areas, travel to work areas or sub-regional city areas to better deliver sustainable development.
RSS deliver sustainable development, a form of development capable of meeting the housing, transport, commercial needs of the country, whilst safeguarding the country’s natural and built environment, rising to the challenge of climate change.
There is a significant gap between supply and rising demand for new homes For decades, the housing market failed to keep up with our ageing and growing population. This has led to significant problems of affordability, particularly for those seeking to buy their first home.
The housing green paper “Homes for the future: more affordable, more sustainable”, published in July 2007, set out Government’s ambition to deliver 240,000 additional homes per year by 2016, bringing greater stability and affordability to the housing market.
In recent years, the housebuilding industry has responded well to the challenge of increasing housing supply, with delivery in 2007/08 reaching 207,500 additional homes – an increase of 59% compared with 130,000 in 2001/02. This is the highest rate of housing supply since the 1977.
Despite falling house prices and sales, long-term pressures on housing supply and affordability remain. Our population continues to grow and age and people are increasingly choosing to live alone; as a result household numbers continue to increase. Constraints on supply in the current market will only increase the unmet demand and need for housing. When access to credit improves a lack of supply will exacerbate the housing pressures.
Government is pressing ahead with the reforms needed to focus on the long-term and condition the market and industry for growth, including re-packaging surplus public sector sites and ensuring better infrastructure co-ordination. We remain committed to influencing the planning system to ensure that it is responsive to our housing supply, and using the local government performance framework and financial incentives to encourage local authorities to strive to achieve growth.
Our latest 2006-based projections indicate that the number of households in England is projected to grow to 27.8 million in 2031, an increase of 6.3 million over the 2006 estimate or 252,000 per year. This underlines the urgent need to maintain our ambition to provide more homes for this, and future generations.
That is why we are pressing ahead with measures to put in place the conditions which will facilitate recovery and enable long-term growth; for example - work is in hand to maximise the impact of these levers in the changed economic circumstances, including exploring ways of strengthening incentives in the Housing and Planning Delivery Grant; sustained engagement with local and regional planning bodies to ensure that the supply of developable land is maintained, that housing numbers in RSSs are maintained and that LDFS are brought forward.
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