Labour will today unveil plans to remove obstacles that could hinder its aim of building 1.5 million homes.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner will lay out reforms intended to speed up the planning process. This will include reducing the number of organisations legally required to comment on planning applications.
Sport England and the Theatres Trust are among the ‘statutory consultees’ to be removed from the requirement.
Ms Rayner said: ‘We need to reform the system to ensure it is sensible and balanced, and does not create unintended delays – putting a hold on people’s lives and harming our efforts to build the homes people desperately need.’
It comes after a Lords committee last month stated that Ms Rayner’s plan to use parts of the green belt for housebuilding would not, in fact, help Labour achieve its 1.5million target this Parliament.
Ms Rayner created the new grey belt classification to open up ‘poor quality’ areas within the protected green belt and is part of the government’s overhaul of the planning system.
Lord Moylan, who charied the committee, said it initially believed the grey belt policy ‘could make a positive contribution to meeting housing targets in a sustainable way’.
But subsequent changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and other parts of planning policy were ‘likely to mean that the impact is, at best, marginal’, he added.
Sir Keir Starmer with Deputy PM Angela Rayner on a construction site in Cambridgeshire. Ministers will today unveil plans to speed up the planning process
Reforms will include reducing the number of organisations legally required to comment on planning applications (file photo)
Estimates of the number of homes that could be built on grey belt land range from 50,000 to four million (file photo)
Uncertainty over how many homes could be built on grey belt land also led to peers questioning how ministers could gauge the effectiveness of the policy.
Estimates of the number of homes which could be delivered this way range from 50,000 to as many as four million.
They also expressed doubts that local planning departments had sufficient resources to deal with the many changes to policy introduced by this government.
Despite welcoming the £46 million package announced at the Budget to boost planning capacity, peers concluded that the 300 extra planners would be insufficient to have any ‘meaningful impact’.
