ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, we saw that Britain’s housing system is one dominated by private sector provision and by homeownership. This system is regulated by central state and by local planning authorities. In recent years, the key issues in planning for housing relate to land and its supply. In this chapter, we aim to provide an introduction to recent house building and land for housing debates in England. Policy debate prior to 2004 provides the essential context to government’s reform of the planning system (see DTLR, 2001c; ODPM, 2002b; ODPM, 2003a; HM Government 2004; see Chapter 9, this volume), and its desire to speed up the planning process; to ensure more efficient use of land through an emphasis on land recycling; to build more ‘sustainable communities’; and to rethink the way planning deals with housing supply. Countless independent studies, commissioned reports and best practice guides have looked at the issue of – or issues relating to – new house building (Adams and Watkins, 2002; Carmona et al., 2003; Barker, 2004). In this chapter, the intention is to provide a concise introduction to recent, pre-2004, debates and issues. We also deal with some of the key issues – relating to land recycling, density and design, affordable housing, and housing numbers in regional planning – that punctuate these debates. Current concerns, relating to sustainable communities and housing supply and the market, are considered in later chapters. Here, we consider:
• the broad parameters of the ‘house building question’; • Labour’s evolving policy agenda, as a lead-in to later chapters dealing with
sustainable communities, planning reform and housing supply; • the recent emphasis on more efficient use of land and the resultant
‘greenfield good, brownfield bad’ mentality permeating government thinking;
• A broad discussion of this land-use debate leads into further discussion of
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recent times, become housing allocations in local development planning (though in Chapter 7 we discuss how this process may be revised in the future).
