Consultation Response - Updates to national planning policy and guidance

By: Cecil Sagoe
Published: December 2018

Consultation Response - Updates to national planning policy and guidance

Shelter welcomes government’s consultation on recent updates to national planning policy and guidance. Shelter would like to take this opportunity to provide thoughts on how strategic and local authorities should be assessing housing need, including the need for social rent homes, with two aims in mind: 

a) the need to assess housing need as robustly as possible to ensure sufficient development is planned for overall, both to meet housing need and to promote sustainable growth 

b) the need to assess housing need in ways which will enable the development of effective policies for increasing build out rates and overall supply

Shelter believes that government should rethink both the standard method for assessing housing need, and the policy context around the method to ensure the planning system can play its full part in meeting housing need. Above all, Shelter believes the standard, required method for assessing housing need should reflect the need for different types and tenures of housing, and that local planning authorities should be empowered and incentivised to meet this need. However, Shelter remains concerned that affordability challenges and needs for specialist housing, for example for older and disabled people, will not be addressed by a method which sets out to deliver a single unit target.