New Bill will boost growth and housebuilding
The Bill will speed up and strengthen the popular neighbourhood planning process.
Measures in the new Neighbourhood Planning Bill will support more housebuilding and provide more local say over developments the Housing and Planning Minister announced today (7 September 2016).
The Bill will speed up and strengthen the popular neighbourhood planning process by simplifying how plans can be revised as local circumstances change and ensure that plans come into force sooner once approved by local people.
Housing and Planning Minister Gavin Barwell said:
The Prime Minister has been absolutely clear that we need to build more homes and this Bill is the first of a number of measures to deliver on that.
We have already built more than 900,000 homes since 2010 and now this Bill will help speed up delivery of the further new homes our country needs and ensure our foot is still firmly on the pedal.
We’re also going further than ever before to speed up neighbourhood planning which puts power in the hands of local people to decide where development gets built.
There will also be a simplifying of the compulsory purchase order process to make it clearer, fairer and faster. Compulsory purchase is always used as a last resort but can be essential in delivering big and complex schemes.
The process can be unnecessarily uncertain and complex. Measures in the Bill will clarify the process which is currently based on a patchwork of statute and case law and make the system fairer for all parties.
Further Bill measures will ensure that planning conditions which require developers to take action before work starts are only used where strictly necessary, but in a way that ensures important heritage and environmental safeguards remain in place, so that once a developer has planning permission they can get on and start building as soon as possible.
The Bill was introduced into Parliament today and will be debated soon.
This government is determined to boost home building and is taking forward the boldest ambition for housing in a generation, with a pledge to deliver one million new homes and a doubling of the housing budget to £20 billion.
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