Gove withdraws mandatory house building targets

Yesterday Michael Gove, announced that he was withdrawing mandatory house building targets and rendering them ‘advisory’.

The Cabinet Secretary for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has reportedly watered down the targets after more than 60 Tory MPs called for them to be scrapped.

A Commons vote on the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill is due to return next week and Gove has now written to a number of MPs promising the target will instead be a "starting point" and become "advisory".

In a statement, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said targets "remain an important part of the planning system", but the government would now "consult on how these can better take account of local density".

Managing director of Stripe Property Group, James Forrester, commented: “This is astonishingly negligent on the part of the government. House building has languished below the required 300,000 annual number since the 1950s and that’s even with the focus and accountability of local authority facing targets. To remove those targets is to allow the UK’s requirement to dangle in the wind and we now have even less chance as a nation of providing adequate dwelling numbers. It’s a dumb move.”

CEO of Alliance, the Real Estate Fund, Iain Crawford, said: “Another day, another u-turn but this one is particularly serious in that in watering down the country’s likely annual residential construction output, thousands of would-be buyers and renters are going to have less choice of home. The result will be even higher house prices as increasing demand from net positive immigration and an aging population continues to outweigh supply."

Head of UK for Unlatch, Lee Martin, added: “Removing accountability for building at local authority level seems somewhat counterintuitive to the problem at hand. Just as the country is slowly getting to grips with higher housebuilding volume and recent completions were starting to look meaningful versus need, the Secretary of State jams that momentum into reverse and effectively kills all possibility of reaching the very levels of supply that the government itself has aimed for but missed for years. It’s hardly progress."