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New council planning powers will speed up development of brownfield land, government says


New powers enabling local planning authorities (LPAs) in England to grant planning 'permission in principle' (PiP) for new housing development on certain categories of land will speed up the delivery of new homes, the government has announced.

From this month, LPAs will be required to produce and maintain up-to-date, publicly available registers of local brownfield land available for housing. Land listed in 'part 2' of these new brownfield land registers will be the first category to benefit from automatic PiP for housing-led development, before the new power is rolled out to other categories of land later this year.

Those using brownfield land for housing development will also be entitled to bid for a share of the government's £3 billion Home Builders Fund; while the government has also provided an additional £1.2bn to support the construction of at least 30,000 'Starter Homes' on brownfield land.

Regulations implementing brownfield land registers and PiP through brownfield registers have now been laid in parliament and will come into force later this month, according to housing and planning minister Gavin Barwell.

"We need to build more homes in this country, so making sure that we re-use brownfield land is crucial," he said.

"We want to bring life back to abandoned sites, create thousands more homes and help protect our valued countryside. These new registers will give local authorities and developers the tools to do this," he said.

Brownfield registers were trialled by 73 LPAs across England last year. According to the government's recent 'white paper' on housing policy reform, the extension of the programme will "ensure that nationally consistent information on suitable brownfield sites is kept up to date and made publicly available for communities and developers".

The new registers will help housebuilders to identify brownfield sites suitable for development quickly, and so speed up the delivery of "thousands" of new homes, according to the government. Communities will be able to use the registers to highlight local derelict or underused sites that are primed for redevelopment.

The registers will be split into two parts. In part 1, LPAs will be required to list all the land in their area that meets the criteria set out in the regulations. Listed land must be able to support at least five dwellings or be at least 0.25 hectares in area; be both 'suitable' and 'available' for residential development, as defined in the regulations; and residential development at the site must be 'achievable', meaning likely to take place in the next 15 years.

Part 2 of the register should list land which has been allocated by the LPA for residential development following mandatory publication and consultation procedures. This is the land to which PiP will apply.

PiP is designed to separate decision-making on issues such as land use, location and amount of residential development from matters of technical detail, and so reduce opportunities for delay to new housing development during the planning process. Where PiP has been granted, a scheme will receive full planning permission once the relevant LPA has consented to the technical details. The acceptability of the 'in principle' issues cannot be reopened at the technical stage. Once granted, PiP for a particular site will last for five years unless the LPA sets a longer or shorter period.

Statutory guidance for local authorities will be published by June 2017, and will explain the role of brownfield registers and PiP in more detail, according to the government.

"The introduction of PiPs has been warmly received by housebuilders, and the general consensus is that they could make a meaningful contribution towards housing supply," said planning law expert Mike Pocock of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com. "However, for resource-hit local authorities it may not all be plain sailing as they get to grips with the new procedural requirements. Inevitably, there will also be legal challenges, particularly where a third party is aggrieved that a site is registered in part 2 of the local brownfield land register."

"It will also be a care of 'watch this space', as not all the legislation and guidance is in place for PiPs. For example, in relation to PiP by application there is currently no statutory instrument dealing with this – although it is understood that regulations will be tabled during the summer," he said.

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