The government recently issued a consultation paper for the revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and has asked for comments. You may recall that the original NPPF came in 2012; it whittled 1,000 pages of policy guidelines down to just 62 and enshrined the ethos of a presumption in favour of pushing sustainable developments. Since then, annual figures for new home building have increased. However, this has been nowhere near enough to meet the chronic housing shortage in the UK.
At the moment, everyone continues to shift the blame for the problem. The government points at the developers for sitting on large sites with planning permission until the market offers the best return. The latter group, however, takes local planning authorities to task for putting too many policy hurdles in the way of legitimate developers. The public are castigated as NIMBYs for not wanting new dwellings anywhere near them, and so they lambast their councillors for allowing construction in their local areas without a corresponding increase in infrastructure by way of more hospital beds, school places, roads and public transport.
On top of all this sits the realisation that the UK’s ratio of house prices to average income is the least affordable in the western world. Furthermore, the definition of an affordable home (one that costs less than £300,000, or £450,000 in London) is nothing of the sort for most people, let alone first time buyers.