Inside Housing – Home – In detail: what the NPPF changes mean for housing delivery

Housing secretary Angela Rayner and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham are given a tour of the Collyhurst Village site, part of the Victoria North development in Manchester (picture: Alamy) Mandatory housing targets
One major reversal of Mr Gove’s amendments is to scrap the “advisory” part of calculating housing need. This had allowed local authorities to potentially deliver fewer houses than the number calculated via the standard method.
Where the NPPF previously stated that “the outcome of the standard method is an advisory starting point for establishing a housing requirement for the area”, this has now been cut entirely and the target is mandatory.
“Those changes run counter to this government’s ambitions on increasing housing supply,” the consultation document says.
Where the previous document included “exceptional circumstances” such as “demographic characteristics” as potential justifications for alternative calculations, lower numbers will now only be allowed if a local planning authority can show “hard constraints”, such as flood risk areas.
They will also need to have exhausted all other options – including “optimising density, sharing need with neighbouring authorities and… reviewing green belt boundaries”, housing minister Matthew Pennycook said in a letter to stakeholders in the sector.
Another small, but crucial, change is the deletion of “as much… as possible” from a sentence on the goal of meeting housing need, which now simply reads: “The overall aim should be to meet an area’s identified housing need.”
New methods
The updated NPPF will introduce a new method for calculating local authority housing targets to match the scale of new homes Labour aspires to build.
The standard method is “insufficient”, Ms Rayner said, relying on “decade-old population projections” and “an arbitrary ‘urban uplift’ that focuses too heavily on London”, as well as lacking “ambition across large parts of the country”.
The overall yearly target is being raised from 300,000 to around 370,000 homes. Under the new measures, every part of England will have to grow its housing stock by 0.8%, set to broadly correspond to the average rate of housing growth.
There is an added ratchet for areas where homes are particularly unaffordable, such as London and the South East. This uplift is based on “how out of step house prices are with local incomes”, calculated using an affordability multiplier of 0.6%.
The capital will be given a new building target of 80,000 homes a year, lower than the goal set by the previous government, but still well above the 35,000 homes delivered in the city last year.
“With a stable number, reflective of local needs and the way housing markets operate, we will stop debates about the right number of homes for which to plan, ensure targets reflect the way towns and cities actually work, and support authorities to get on with plan-making,” Ms Rayner said.



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