Prime Minister to force councils and developers to build more affordable homes

The Prime Minister Theresa May has delivered her long-promised keynote speech on how she’s going to achieve her government’s ambitious house building targets. As well as a promised reform of the national system of planning, she also included a strong challenge to builders that her government would only continue to support them via schemes such as Help to Buy if they started building more affordable homes. She also called for developers to “do their duty” and stop using the viability assessment process to “dodge their obligations”. These are reviews that builders can request that councils undertake to work out how profitable a development is likely to be, and if necessary reduce the number of affordable homes within a site. A report by Shelter in November last year revealed that at sites where viability assessment were undertaken, 7% of homes were affordable. Some 28% of property developments are supposed to be affordable, on average. While speaking against a backdrop of bricks at the Royal Town Planning Institute in London – which some commentators on Twitter were less than kind about (see below) – May revealed a major reform of the National Planning Policy Framework. This is designed to release more land…