English councils will fall almost 30,000 homes short of meeting housing need each year under the government’s reformed planning system.
Figures obtained by Inside Housing this week show councils are planning for 183,000 homes a year in their adopted or emerging local plans. But government household projection data states 212,500 new homes are needed each year to keep up with demand.
This means the nine English regions will fall 14 per cent short of meeting housing need. The figures will fuel fears that the government’s localism agenda, which ended central housing targets in favour of locally set development plans, could exacerbate the housing crisis.
Pippa Read, policy leader at National Housing Federation, warned that councils ‘must robustly assess the homes that are needed in their areas and plan how they will meet this demand’.
‘Not doing so would be too costly when house building is at its lowest peacetime level since the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of new households are being created each year and millions of people remain on housing waiting lists,’ she said.
Councils have until April to draw up local plans under the government’s new national planning policy framework. Local plans allocate land for housing and justify the scale of development over a period of 15 to 20 years.
The region with the least hope of meeting housing demand is the east of England, where councils are planning just 19,000 homes a year despite needing around 32,000 annually according to government predictions.