Housing White Paper & CIL Review Panel Report Published

The Government has today published its long awaited Housing White Paper – ‘Fixing our broken housing market’ alongside the CIL Review team’s research commissioned by DCLG to look at whether the current CIL regime was fit for purpose.

Key elements of the White Paper include:

 – the potential introduction of policies for local authorities to ensure that a minimum of 10% of all homes on sites of 10 or more units are affordable home ownership products – a move away from the Starter Homes initiatives previously announced

 – Introducing maximum earnings for starter homes eligibility

 – Forcing councils to produce an up-to-date plan for housing demand

 – Expecting developers to avoid “low-density” housing where land availability is short

 – Reducing the time allowed between planning permission and the start of building from three to two year

 – Using a £3bn fund to help smaller building firms challenge major developers, including support for off-site construction, where parts of buildings are assembled in a factory

 – Widening the definition of affordable housing to include affordable private rent housing and discounted market sales housing

The CIL Review Team paper has also been published and recommends that the Government should replace the Community Infrastructure Levy with a hybrid system of a broad and low level
Local Infrastructure Tariff (LIT) and Section 106 for larger developments. Other recommendations include:

 – LIT should be calculated using a national formula based on local market value set at a rate of £ per square metre

 – Government should devise a LIT formula for commercial development that ties it to the residential rate but which does not exceed it

 – there should be no (or very few) exemptions to the LIT

 – examination process should be replaced by a simple mechanism to address any representations on coverage or quantum of the LIT rates

 – requirement for a Regulation 123 list should be removed and spending of the LIT should be reported through the Authorities’ Monitoring Report

 – small developments (10 units or less) should pay only the LIT and no other obligations, unless exceptional circumstances apply

 – for large/strategic developments local authorities should be able to negotiate additional and specific Section 106 arrangements

 – pooling restrictions set out in Regulation 123 should be removed

 – that the Government considers amendments to the regulations as an interim measure to address the most immediate issues arising from CIL

 – that a LIT should be a mandatory charge except where it would bring in insufficient funds to justify the cost of collection

 – that Government allows for sufficient transitional arrangements to be put in place. 2020 would appear to be a sensible date for transition to be completed

 

The Housing White Paper is available here..

The CIL Review Team report is available here..