Grey belt housing delivery will be ‘meaningful but not significant’, says minister

The amount of green belt land likely to be released as a result of the government’s grey belt policy is likely to be lower than speculation has suggested, according to the housing minister.

Appearing in front of the House of Lords built environment committee yesterday, Matthew Pennycook said he could not say exactly how much land would be released and refused to put a target on the level of delivery expected from the grey belt, although he said it would likely be less than 10% of overall green belt.

“We’re only talking about releases where local authorities are unable to meet assessed housing needs through brownfield development alone, but where it does need to be released, it will be based on a local figure, and that will differ in lots of different areas. 

“So it is not, I’m afraid, as easy as plucking a sort of single digit figure out of the air”.

“I’m quite happy to say we don’t think it will be a significant quantity of land, but it will be a modest amount of land that does make a difference,” he said, while challenging suggestions from peers that such a limited release would not be “meaningful”.

He also said the level of release as a total proportion of the green belt would be lower than the double-digit estimates made by organisations such as Lichfields and LandTech.

“I think what we could say about those sorts of figures in those ranges is they are not overlaid with the policy requirements I’m talking about,” he said, noting that they did not take into account the government’s golden rules and other requirements of the National Planning Policy Framework.

“What I would say is that I’m confident that we will see green belt release through grey belt in single digits in terms of a total proportion of the green belt, and that’s what I mean by not significant,” he said.

Pennycook stressed that the purpose of the grey belt policy was to make the release of green belt land more strategic.

“We thought there was a smarter, strategic way to release the right parts of the green belt,” he said.

Pennycook’s appearance came at the end of the built environment committee’s short inquiry into the grey belt policy, which saw the original definition of the category called into question.

Witnesses suggested that the definition of grey belt lacked clarity and would lead to ‘confusion’ among planners and a surge in legal challenges.

Such concerns resulted in the government tightening up their definition of the term in the final version of the NPPF, published last week.

Pennycook told the committee that the terms that the new definition are based on have “common sense meaning in the courts”.

“I don’t think it introduces a level […] of ambiguity that is not present in other parts of the National Planning Policy Framework, I think it’s quite clear what the definition is,” he said.

The final version of the NPPF also saw the government drop its 50% affordability requirement, replacing it with a 15% premium on local requirements.

Explaining the change, Pennycook said the previous approach would have made “a huge swathe of sites in the Midlands and the North unviable”.

Quizzed on why the government had not set out interim targets for achieving its overall aim of building 1.5 million homes across the parliament, Pennycook blamed the previous government.

“If we had inherited from the previous government a steady state of supply at a high level, we could have said we intend to continue with that steady state of supply or increase it by a margin amount,” he said. 

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“What we have instead inherited is a very sharp downturn in supply, I go so far as to say a collapse in affordable housing supply in many parts of the country. So we are in a real trough.”

He acknowledged that the 1.5 million target was “incredibly difficult”, suggesting that a lower target of 1.1 million would have been “very easy to deliver” given the scale of the government’s planning reforms. 

“We decided not to do that because I don’t think it would have been commensurate with the scale of the housing crisis we see across the country,” he said.

Pennycook also spoke about the “thoroughly depleted” nature of local planning departments, which he blamed on historic cuts.

“I’m sort of straying outside my brief but when you sort of confront the challenges of the housing and planning system that we’ve inherited, you pretty much bump up against the fact that the state has been hollowed out in several areas that directly impact upon the functioning of that system,” he said.