This morning’s big housebuilding announcement was aimed at unblocking obstacles in the planning system to get development of new homes and extensions going. But it hasn’t unblocked tensions within the government. The main controversy is over whether to relax the quotas for affordable housing within each new development, and The Times reports that Nick Clegg and Eric Pickles were at loggerheads with George Osborne over the idea.
This morning, Downing Street announced that developers can bypass a council’s affordable housing requirements if they feel they make a site commercially unviable. The claim is that this will release 75,000 new homes currently stuck behind this barrier. There are various measures to mitigate the drop in the number of affordable homes delivered through this route, including guaranteeing housing association debt, and £300 million to build 15,000 affordable homes and to bring 5,000 empty homes back into use.
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