In February 2024, Michael Gove told councils to prioritise brownfield development as a means of boosting housebuilding numbers while also protecting green belt land.
As part of the proposals, every council in England has been told that they must be ‘less bureaucratic and more flexible in applying policies that halt housebuilding on brownfield sites’.
The bar will be much higher for refusing brownfield schemes for the country’s 20 largest cities and towns’ councils, if their number of new housebuilding projects drop below 95% of target levels.
The consultation also proposes amending paragraph 129 © of the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015/596 to provide that local planning authorities should give significant weight to the benefits of delivering as many homes as possible and take a flexible approach to matters such as internal layouts of development.
This all makes good sense – demand for new housing is far greater than current housebuilding levels. Research carried out in January 2020, found that there are almost 18,000 brownfield sites with a total of more than 25,000 hectares spread across the UK – with 2,889 sites in London — thereby demonstrating some real opportunity to increase house building numbers if these sites can be made viable alongside a less stringent planning policy being applied (quickly!) to any planning applications made in respect of the same (even if just to prioritise the development of low-cost and affordable social housing).
But, it is important to acknowledge that brownfield sites come with unique sets of challenges from legal and environmental to technical and commercial – and these invariably take more time and cost to navigate. This means that it’s not only brownfield sites that the Government need to focus on, but that this should be one strand of a more concerted effort to remove some of the barriers to new build residential development across the country to tackle the housing shortage and truly facilitate house building.
Benefits
The Government’s mandate for the relaxation of planning rules in relation to brownfield sites is one of many factors which may be attractive to developers and local authorities:
- Economic benefits — a well-thought-out and implemented brownfield development scheme can create jobs and economic activity – and should encourage more development in the area
- Community benefits — the Environment Agency says that consolidating developments on brownfield land can improve existing services such as transport, utilities and waste management. It can also encourage sustainable lifestyles and, generate opportunities to recycle ‘forgotten’ land and clean up contaminated, dangerous eyesores to make them a community asset rather than a liability.
- Infrastructure - infrastructure is often already in place (given the historic use of many brownfield sites) and local amenities are nearby, creating an immediate saving for developers (which might help off-set some of the other abnormal costs associated with the development of brownfield land).
- Incentives – to further encourage development, additional grants and tax credits may be available (although many developers would suggest that the process for securing such grants and credits should be made simpler and quicker, so that a developer can quickly establish whether or not such funding should be included within its viability assessment of potential brownfield development sites).
Challenges
There are also, however, myriad challenges surrounding brownfield developments, including:
- Biodiversity Net Gain (’BNG’) – The BNG baseline for these sites is often higher, with urban mosaic wildlife presenting a rarer biodiversity set (nationally scarce invertebrates and lower plants), which can struggle to be established in the countryside. This will reduce net developable area and therefore the value of any potential brownfield development site.
- Development yields – owners and developers may seek higher development yields presented by asset classes other than residential. This changes from time to time, though, depending on the market for the various asset classes.
- Development barriers – there are many physical issues which hamper the development of brownfield sites; demolition and decontamination (and related landfill taxes and importation of clean soil) costs, archaeological features (which are often more common) and the presence of utilities, which need to be redirected. These all create abnormal costs on such sites.
- Planning requirements – given their location (predominantly urban sites), housing planning permissions may have community benefit payments linked to them (thereby increasing development costs and making the relevant sites unattractive for the purposes of commercial residential development).
- Finance – getting finance may be more problematic – funders will want full protection from warranties for any hidden liabilities, and this may make borrowing more costly and time consuming.
- Consumer Confidence – there may be a public perception/wariness about houses being built on industrial sites, with undesirable surrounding areas. This is a risk that even hardened developers would consider carefully, even though we know that residential developers are well experienced in remediation of brownfield sites so that this seem to be a perception rather than a reality issue.
So, while developers and local authorities will welcome the Government’s proposals there are still lots of other factors which means that this shift in respect of potential brownfield development sites is not the ‘magic wand’ to solve the housing shortage. The proposal is a start (and not to be discredited) but it is not a panacea. The Government must look at residential development more widely and explore ways to catalyse the planning system so that the need for new housing nationally is properly catered for.