Government £200m Brownfields Building Fund Falls Flat, As Number Of New Homes Declines

A £200million Government fund to pay for more homes on industrial land has resulted in the opposite effect, with fewer homes built on brownfield areas than before it was set up. Official Government’s land use change statistics show that the proportion of new homes registered on previously developed land has fallen by 4 percentage points since 2014, when the fund was set up. Yet over the same period the number of new residential addresses on supposedly heavily protected Green Belt land has increased by the same proportion - 4 per cent. Read more on the Daily Telegraph website.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/19/government-200m-brownfields-building-fund-falls-flat-number/

Calls for Strategic Planning Incentives to Boost Housing

Strong financial incentives are needed to coordinate planning and land use strategically across council boundaries with ‘meaningful penalties’ for councils which fail to do so, according to a new report on how cities could transform house-building performance. That’s the conclusion of the ‘Growing Cities’ publication produced by think-tank the Institute for Public Policy Research and housing charity Shelter, which argues that drastic action is needed to tackle the urban housing crisis. The authors concluded that councils within city-regions “should be strongly incentivised to work closely together to co-ordinate building more homes”. The report argued that strategic planning powers and budgets should be devolved to cities and resources such as public land should be pooled and coordinated across boundaries. Read more on the Planning Portal website.