What can we expect from the Queen’s Speech?

It has been a rollercoaster ride for those of us following progress of government planning and housing policy. Finally, it all comes to a head today in the Queen’s Speech when we will get to hear the denouement of much leaked deliberations.

Housing secretary Michael Gove is not a man to be constrained by Tory orthodoxy. Instead, is he set to reassure us with policies that reveal an analytical thinker capable of making up his own mind? There is much to anticipate in social housing, planning reform, sustainability, suburban and urban intensification as well as procurement.

>> Also read: Gove confirms plans for local design codes

So far no substantive public money has been committed to Gove’s levelling up agenda, with the chancellor Rishi Sunak tweaking at the edges in his Spring Statement.

Housing

Hope for policies to address the crisis in supply and affordability lies in Gove being the first Tory housing minister in living memory to break out of the orthodoxy limited to rewarding middle-class voters with demand-side subsidies which serve only to fuel house-price rises, pushing homes yet further out of reach. So now there is a broader electoral issue affecting parents who must subsidise first-time buyers.

At odds with the prime minister’s enthusiasm for selling off affordable stock – this time it will be housing association tenants who get the right to buy – Gove is gambling on the electorate’s ability to grasp that investing in council housing will save billions on housing benefit that lines the pocket of unscrupulous rentiers, and instead create genuinely affordable, high-quality, sustainable homes, drive up employment, reduce homelessness and, in the end, bring house prices down too.

Gove is gambling on the electorate’s ability to grasp that investing in council housing will save billions on housing benefit that lines the pocket of unscrupulous rentiers

Simply put, the £29bn so far spent on Help to Buy would have been better spent on building more affordable homes. To fund council housebuilding Gove intends to replace cross-subsidy via section 106 as a means of delivering affordable homes with, instead, an infrastructure levy paid direct to local authorities.

Although it’s the same money – essentially a tax on home purchases – redirecting it has the potential to boost local authority arm’s-length delivery agencies that have demonstrated a concern for design quality and sustainability. There are of course risks in how Westminster will handle these funds, but also potential benefits for places hamstrung by low values.

Meanwhile the Social Housing Reform Bill aims to improve the quality and regulation of social housing, give residents performance information so that they can hold their landlord to account, and ensure that landlords take quick and effective action to put things right when residents make a complaint.

Planning

Gove has already spared us the worst of the misguided and potentially catastrophic “once in a generation” shakeup of the planning system which would have clogged up development management rather than unlocking housing delivery.

Instead, he appears refreshingly sympathetic to local authorities, and we see a renewed enthusiasm for community involvement in planning decisions, enhanced by investment in digitalising the system to facilitate public access.

Money distributed through the Shared Prosperity Fund will be overseen by locally elected members, MPs, local businesses and community groups. The National Planning Policy Framework is already strengthened around design quality and the National Model Design Code is useful guidance that illustrates the narrative. More say for communities and rights for neighbours of development to object should emerge, balanced with measures making it more difficult to block compliant schemes.

More say for communities and rights for neighbours of development to object should emerge, balanced with measures making it more difficult to block compliant schemes

Nationwide zoning with permitted development in growth areas has gone. The requirement for vast front-loaded resources required to implement such a system effectively killed it off. But targeted policies attached to locally designated zones can work well. We can expect the street votes idea, of granting permission to residents to radically densify existing suburban streets, to find its way into planning policy, most likely initially in the form of pilot schemes.

Gove has shown himself to be mindful of environmental sustainability with his refusal of the Tulip on grounds of carbon lifecycle costs and his call-in of the Marble Arch M&S redevelopment. Support for street votes – advocated by Policy Exchange and based in part on HTA’s Supurbia idea of allowing neighbours to redevelop adjoining properties – will help to deliver more sustainable suburban intensification of the kind that will be necessary if we are to avoid urban sprawl.

There is much to be done on devolution, from measures to support regeneration in less prosperous places, to reuse of brownfield land and enhanced compulsory purchase powers so that town centres across the nation may be rescued from dereliction. At HTA Design we have schemes to redevelop defunct shopping malls with streets of housing at densities to bring life to struggling town centres. Importantly, local authorities need to be able to use compulsory purchase orders to see off the scourge of absentee landlords, bringing empty flats over shops back into use.

Procurement

Finally, when it comes to delivering all this, the hopeless bureaucracy and misguided constraints of public sector procurement may be replaced by sensible provisions. Those provisions published earlier in the government’s Construction Playbook might find their way into a Procurement Bill postponed from the last Queen’s speech, cutting through the absurd and unnecessary cost of intermediary frameworks out of all proportion to the value of professional services and building construction.

The devil is in the detail of the secondary legislation that must follow much of this innovation – but so far so good. Early signs of Gove’s term as secretary of state at the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities augur well.