Why concerns about the effect of the new government’s housing targets on the countryside are misplaced
When the new Labour government’s proposed housing targets were published in July there was some surprise that many planning authorities, particularly urban ones, had seen a significant reduction in the number of homes they were being expected to deliver, and that there was a discernible shift away from the south-east of England to the north-west.
The map below shows the percentage change for each planning authority in England. The authority with the largest reduction is Tower Hamlets, going from 5,190 homes to 2,177 using the proposed Standard Method; a reduction of 58%.
At the other end of the scale, Redcar & Cleveland’s increase of over 1,300% seems large until you realise this is a jump from just 45 homes per annum to 642. That’s just 30% of Tower Hamlet’s new total, despite Redcar & Cleveland having an area more than 11 times greater than the east London borough.
Maybe, then, the changes in numbers expressed as a percentage of previous calculations are not that useful? A different method might be to consider the total number of homes in terms of density. The map below shows what this looks like.
As expected, those areas that you’d assume would have the highest housing demands (in and around England’s major cities) see the greatest number of homes her hectare. Top of the list is London Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, with 3.45 homes per hectare required to meet the new targets. This is an outlier: next on the list is neighbouring City of Westminster, with a target of 1.72 homes per hectare. The top 25 authorities by density are all within London, and the first ranked authority outside the south-east is the City of Bristol, with a target of just 0.28 homes per hectare.
These housing targets have been greeted with considerable uproar, particularly from the anti-development brigade which spuriously claims that this amounts to nothing less than “concreting over the countryside”.
As an example, in an open letter to Angela Rayner published shortly after the targets were revealed, East Hampshire District Council raised the following concerns:
“East Hampshire’s housing targets, as determined by the standard methodology, show we must identify sites for almost 11,000 homes by 2040.
“But those calculations take no account of the fact that 57 per cent of the district is inside the South Downs National Park, an area where development is restricted.
“That leaves the remaining 43 per cent of the district to take the lion’s share of development.
“Inevitably that will put pressure on our highly-prized countryside and our rural towns and villages, which have already seen so much change over the past few years.
“This is not sustainable development. It is the damage done by a blunt instrument – a planning policy that takes no view of unique local factors.”
Whilst it’s true that a large proportion of East Hampshire is located within a national park, to suggest that these figures are unachievable is ludicrous. Even building at a relatively low density of 40 homes per hectare, its five-year target of 5,370 would require just a quarter of one percent of its total area to deliver—even if it were to be accommodated in a single location. The reality is, in fact, that most of this will be achieved through the intensification and expansion of existing settlements.
Here’s a map of the district showing the land required to deliver 5,370 homes at 40 dwellings per hectare.
Similar complaints have been heard in Cherwell, which sits to the north of Oxford. Cherwell is similar in size to East Hampshire, albeit without a chunk of national park, so it would take rather a lot of effort to “carpet over” it, as Conservative Councillor Eddie Reeves suggests will happen under the new targets.
To be fair, Cherwell does accommodate some of Oxford’s green belt in the southern region, but other than that is pretty much free from planning constraints. Again, even with a 55% uplift in housing numbers it could find all 5,475 homes using just 0.23% of its land. Suggestions that significant parts of the countryside will be lost to development are very wide of the mark.
Down in Kent, Conservative councillors of Tonbridge & Malling got particularly excited about their new targets, being required to find space for 5,285 homes over the next five years—an increase of just under a third. A large part of the district is within London’s green belt, with some of this coinciding with the Kent Downs AONB. But, as the green belt is no longer a constraint on development, there’s more than enough space for these homes. Hardly the “naked opportunism” that the local Tory Councillor Matt Boughton seems to think it is.
West Berkshire is on a war footing after council leaders described the new targets as a “bombshell“. The CPRE, which can always be relied on to keep a level head in the time of crisis, backed these protestations, claiming that the authority’s new targets of 5,285 homes over five years are “excessive and unsustainable”.
A large chunk of West Berkshire is, to be fair, covered by the North Wessex Downs AONB, and this will certainly prevent housebuilding at scale. But the remaining areas to the southeast, around Newbury and Thatcham, have no such constraints, so there’s no reason why these homes cannot easily be accommodated, particularly as most will be located within the boundaries of existing towns.
It’s tempting to snigger at the hysterical language employed by the many politicians who oppose the building of homes in their local areas, but I genuinely believe that they have a very limited understanding of the scales of land involved. It’s easy to look out of your window at miles of fields and worry that a housebuilder is going to come and plonk a bunch of executive homes in the way of your view, and in some cases that is bound to happen.
But as for “concreting over the countryside”, well, nothing could be further from the truth. The countryside is huge.
We know from previous research that the public has little understanding of how much of the country is built on. A survey in 2018 showed that people tend to think that nearly half of it is. But England’s urban areas take up about 14% of its total area—and that includes urban parks and gardens. The land covered by buildings themselves is even smaller than this. That leaves around 11.5 million hectares of open countryside, most of which is for agriculture.
Now imagine that the government’s 1.5m home target was being located in an entirely new settlement somewhere in the countryside. At a modest density of 40 homes per hectare it would take up an area of 37,500 hectares. That’s just over 2% of the size of England’s green belt. This is what a circle with an area of 37,500 hectares overlaid on a map of England looks like:
Whichever way you look at it, the countryside is safe.
Maps of Every Planning Authority in England
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