Housing Targets vs. Council Refusals: Can Labour Deliver?
Is it possible for Labour to meet their housing targets with current refusal rates from Local Councils? If so, then Labour’s ambitious housing target of 1.5 million homes over the next 5 years needs to be achieved through:
- An overhaul of the planning system
- Targets for councils
- The use of grey belt land
- Local plan for every area
Local plans allocate areas for housing developments to be built.
Only one-third of councils have a Local Plan newer than 5 years old and the Government has stated that it will step in to drive progress where necessary.
In terms of location, if a prospective housing development falls within the bounds of the Local Plan it should be expected to be approved.
If planning applications are being refused, is this because they are in the wrong areas? If they are in the wrong areas, then are the local plans out of line with the desires of developers? If local authorities are not updating Local Plans, then are they using them? And if they are not, why should developers?
What is best for an area and what is most profitable for developers can align but there will be cases where it does not. To be realistic, Local Plans and the planning approvals that come from them will often have to strike a balance.
Highest residential refusal decisions from Barbour ABI Data
Barbour ABI has calculated the UK Local Authorities with the most refusal decisions* for residential developments using data from 2024.
- Croydon
- Bromley
- Cornwall (Unitary)
- Birmingham
- Epping Forest
- Windsor & Maidenhead
- Cheshire East
- Havering
- Leeds
- Uttlesford
While not having the highest refusal number in total, Croydon Local Authority came top of our list when the number of total applications were considered. Croydon had a Refusal Rate of 64% with 97 refusals of the 152 housing development decisions**.
The map below shows the differences in Approvals and Refusals in the Croydon Local Authority. There are large numbers of applications in the north of the district, almost all of which have been refused.
If there are lots of applications being put into areas within Local Authorities which are all being refused it suggests a need for planning reform. Whether the issue is with local plans or the developers, changes need to be made to make the best areas desirable for developers to ensure we build enough of the correct kinds of homes, in the right places and at the right volume.
With Labour’s need to try and at least come close to hitting their 1.5 million new homes target, this level of refusal won’t help their cause.
During our ‘100 Days of Labour’ webinar hosted by Head of Business and Client Analytics, Ed Griffiths, ‘New Towns’ were mentioned as a possible solution to help deliver Labour’s 1.5 million new homes.
Milton Keynes is a perfect success story for the fight for new towns. Identified in 1967, it’s grown to have a population of around 250k residents. Milton Keynes, however, is considered a massive outlier compared to other new towns.
Any New Town strategy would undeniably look to emulate the success of Milton Keynes. However, Ed stated that it could be naive to hope such a strategy could help chase the 1.5 million homes target, as it would take much longer than the 5 years that Labour need to hit the target within. To access all the material covered in this webinar, please click here.
* Weighted Refusal rate is calculated by taking the number of applications refused and weighting by the total number of approvals and refusals for the LA and all LAs in the UK.
** Development decisions are the total number of approval and refusal decisions on planning applications.
