Select committee: Built Environment Committee
Conclusion 157
1st Report - Meeting housing demand
Published 10 Jan 2022
Built Environment Committee Meeting the UK’s housing demand All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
Research for the Centre for Cities concluded that the release for development of all land within 800 metres of any stations with a service of around 45 minutes to a major city, if that land had no marker of amenity or environmental value, would provide an additional 47,000 hectares in just five city-regions. 239 Setting aside 10% of this total for new accessible green space and building at a density of 50 homes to the hectare would provide land for 2.1 million new homes. While such a proposal would take some Green Belt land, the proportion it would apply to is small: for the five metropolitan regions included in the study this would cover just 1.8% of existing Green Belt land. Box 6: Development of land around the Manchester city region As an example, for the Manchester city region, there are 242 qualifying commuter stations. The total area of buildable land within 800 meters of these stations is 10,977 hectares. Allowing for 10% of this buildable land to be devoted to publicly accessible open space, there would be 9,879 hectares for new housing development. Assuming a density of 40 homes per hectare, this would enable the creation of 395,200 homes. Source: Centre for Cities, Homes on the Right Tracks report Homes on the right tracks: Greening the Green Belt to solve the housing crisis (September 2019): https://www.centreforcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Homes- on-the-Right-Tracks-Greening-the-Green-Belt.pdf [accessed 2 December 2021]
From: Built Environment Committee, 1st Report - Meeting housing demand, 10 January 2022
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 28 March 2022 (deadline 10 March 2022).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The Government welcomes the Committee's report and says it is "taking action on a number of the issues identified", agreeing with some recommendations while disagreeing with others, including on home ownership schemes and the Apprenticeship Levy.
- It "disagrees with the report's assessment that homeownership schemes do not provide good value for money", citing independent evaluations and its own evaluation of Help to Buy.
- On older people's housing, it is launching a new taskforce "this year", chaired by the Minister for Housing, to look at better choice, quality and security of housing.
- It does "not intend to set out a proportion" of Affordable Homes Programme funding for social housing, though "around half" of the affordable homes are to be for social and affordable rent.
- On the Apprenticeship Levy it says it has "no plans to review" it. On planning fees it is "exploring options" to increase them, and on local plans it will make an announcement "in due course".