Beyond the Permacrisis – Delivering 1,000 Homes per Day – the Report of the Radix Big Tent Housing Commission

The Radix Big Tent Housing Commission was set up in March 2024. Its aim was to bring together a group of professionals across a range of different disciplines to discuss and formulate ideas in response to the ‘permacrisis’ in housing in England.

The format of the Commission was a mix of in-person meetings, round-tables taking evidence from others across the industry, and online meetings. When we started, the plan was to deliver our recommendations to the new government after what we all anticipated would be an Autumn election. However, Rishi Sunak had other ideas and his rain-soaked election announcement meant that we had to pivot and evolve our thinking quickly. We were working in a new political climate, very much in discussion mode but needing to reach meaningful conclusions whilst working alongside a new Labour government eager to hit the ground running and making early policy announcements.

The Report was published in October 2024 and is a radical but pragmatic response to England’s housing crisis. The overarching message of the Report is that housing should be recognised as national infrastructure and that there is no single policy solution that will fix the crisis. There is a complex ecosystem that governs the delivery of housing and the component parts are all connected. It is critical therefore to consider the impact of changes on every part of that ecosystem to reach the best outcomes. 

There are fifteen recommendations set out in the Report which are broadly grouped into the three main headings - implementation, funding and planning. 

Implementation and delivery

Key to delivery is a new clear strategy around the governance and management of housing at government level. The report recommends the establishment of a new Housing Delivery Unit tasked with the formation of a UK national housing strategy. This unit would work alongside an independent statutory housing committee. The committee would be modelled on the Climate Change Committee so that it would guide and assess action across all government departments, and it would survive and outlast political cycles. 

The recommendations also call for an easier process for the release of public sector land for housing and providing more targeted support for local and combined authorities through the use of property professionals from the private sector, regeneration practitioners, and those who have experience of negotiating with the private sector, and also rethinking the role of Homes England. The Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook has already written to the Chair of Homes England (Chair’s letter 30 September 2024) to set out  new priorities for the agency to focus on doing everything in its power to accelerate the development of new homes, maximising the number of social rent homes delivered and supporting the reform and diversification of the housing market. 

Funding and affordability

The diversification of the housing market is at the heart of the recommendations falling under the umbrella issue of funding. Recognising the pressures on public sector funding, recommendations are made to streamline existing funding pots and processes to maximise efficiency and make better use of the resources available. There is an urgent need for funding to be secure and certain over the longer term to ensure the ability of stakeholders to invest. The Government has already responded to the calls for a prompt rent settlement in social housing with plans announced for a new 5-year settlement at the end of October and an additional £500m in grant funding to top up the Affordable Homes Programme. 

Alongside the improvements to these funding streams, the Report asks the Government to move away from prioritising home ownership at all costs and to recognise the importance of rental tenures, with the opportunities highlighted to bring in institutional investment to contribute to delivering new housing across a range of different tenures. The scale of capital required to deliver the housing targets is far too significant to be met by public sector funding alone given competing demands and there are investors ready and willing to deploy their capital into the UK housing market. These opportunities should be capitalised on. 

The other aspect of funding the Report looks at is s106 agreements. It recommends reform of the current system which is a mish-mash of s106 and Community Infrastructure Levy, varying across authorities, to be replaced with an improved and more consistent system. Combined authorities should be encouraged to make use of existing powers to raise Strategic Infrastructure Tariffs which would enable greater pooling of resources to deliver infrastructure in a more strategic way (using the model of Mayoral CIL in London which was used to deliver Crossrail) This could be used by strategic planning authorities in conjunction with the strategic planning recommendations made. These are discussed in the following section.   

Planning and boosting supply of homes

Back in 2010 when Eric Pickles was the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government he took the decision to abolish Regional Strategies as part of the pursuit of the Localism agenda (meaning that decisions would rest at local level). The abolition of this strategic tier of planning is cited in the Report as having had a significantly negative impact on the housebuilding industry. Restoration of strategic planning is therefore a key recommendation and suggestions for the geography of potential strategic planning areas are included in the Report. The Government appears to be on board with this direction of travel and, in July 2024, it set out a 5-year pathway to universal coverage across England so that all areas will benefit from a strategic plan. It is anticipated that the groundwork needed for this will be set up in in the legislation to be published during 2025:  Planning and Infrastructure and Devolution Bills were both included in the Kings Speech. A truly plan-led system is the aim, which could free up local authority planners to focus on strategic questions rather than day-to-day development management. A new team within MHCLG is also proposed in order to provide a more coordinated approach and to work across departments; this team would be the ‘ringmaster’ for strategic planning.

There are also some quicker wins in the Report in terms of the planning system. It sets out a detailed set of proposed tweaks and improvements to the current decision-making process, many of which could be achieved by changes to the current policy framework. Examples include the use of standardised conditions and s106 obligations, mandating the use of “Arsenal conditions” (which prevent a planning permission being implemented until a binding section 106 is entered into), and publication of the review of statutory consultees which has already been carried out. Whilst primary legislation will be needed to effect some of the report’s proposals (such as dealing with the impacts of recent caselaw in Hillside Parks Ltd v Snowdonia National Park Authority and R (Dennis) v LB Southwark, rationalising the list of statutory consultees, and a national scheme of delegation), the opportunity to include these in the forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill should hopefully mean that these improvements can be put into place very soon.

The Report also recommends an independent review of the Green Belt around London as well as the formulation of a consistent template and process for green belt reviews across the rest of the country which would reduce the arguments at local plan examinations about the different methodologies used. There is, in addition, a recognition of the role that SME, community-led and self/custom build housebuilders can make to increasing the supply of housing in the short to medium term. Again this is about grasping all opportunities to deliver more supply - all of which serves the aim of getting to the 1.5 million homes promised over the next 5 years.

Conclusion

There is an urgent need to deliver on the Government’s pledge to provide more homes over the course of this Parliament. As the Report recognises, it will not be fixed overnight and there is much to do. The focus of the recommendations is therefore a mixture of small and practical steps that can be implemented now alongside more medium term aims that require legislation and further thought. 

The report calls for radical longer-term action to meet wider and global challenges such as meeting net zero targets and the decarbonisation of the construction and maintenance of new homes. The Report could only touch the surface of these critical issues but provides some high-level themes for future discussions to build on. 

This article was previously published in EG.