King's Speech: Housing, planning reform and infrastructure.

Housing availability, affordability, and access to the housing market have become critical issues in the UK. Seeking to resolve these issues has therefore become a priority for successive governments. The onus however seems to remain on building and reform of the planning process as the means for mitigating any crisis.

This tendency is again central to the new government’s agenda for ‘getting Britain building’, to be set out in their forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Reform Bill. In lieu of detail on the bill, criticism would be unfair. But any intervention which is seriously looking to impact the enduring issues of both availability and affordability needs to seriously consider the following alongside any development objectives;

• More effective resources for decimated planning services, and a programme of reskilling and improving technological literacy within the profession, in line with the objectives of their related Sustainable Development bill
• Alongside central determination and scrutiny of development, enabling flexible responses to localised areas, local needs, and causes of overheating
• A moratorium on how to regulate and therefore identify ways to prevent future overheating and link development with need rather than demand
• An acknowledgement and ideally separation of policy responses to the causes of availability and affordability
• Linking of any development policy to an appropriate set of financial instruments enabling prioritised access to new development for those at risk of exclusion from the market