Ministers will drop requirements for new housing to be “beautiful” under major new changes to planning rules, The i Paper can reveal.
Under reforms due to be announced on Thursday, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner will reverse the requirement for all new developments to meet standards on “beauty” in a bid to speed up delivery of new homes.
The move will raise fears that the new Labour Government will seek to bulldoze through large-scale developments in a bid to meet its target of delivering 1.5 million new homes by the end of the Parliament.
The changes will come as part of the revamped National Planning Policy Framework, and will replace what officials believe is a “vague” reference to beauty with requirements for new well-designed homes.
It comes as Rayner said she intends to streamline the planning process to ensure planning applications do not get held up by “Nimbys” [Not in my backyard].
As part of the reforms, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government will update the National Design Guide and National Model Design Code in spring next year.
A Whitehall source said: “The last government’s imposition of vague and subjective requirements for ‘beautiful’ developments erected new hurdles and slowed down the delivery of new homes.”
Removing the rules will “speed up planning”, the source added, while retaining requirements for “well-designed homes and places”.
The rules were introduced by former housing secretary Michael Gove, who deployed them to block a 165-home development in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, for being too “generic”.
Gove then used the requirements to call in a 200-home scheme in Leamington Spa, which led to the developer pulling the project.
Officials insist that removing the rules from the NPPF will be welcomed by the industry, with sources claiming that developers disliked the rules as being “difficult to understand and implement”, while slowing the construction of new homes.
The Royal Institute of British Architects, criticised the rules, stating that the previous government made them too subjective, meaning they were too often being used as a “reason to refuse necessary and otherwise high-quality development”.
But questions will be raised as to whether the new guidelines will be sufficient to ensure developers do not carpet the country with cheap, low quality housing to meet the Government’s targets.
An industry source welcomed the news, telling The i Paper: “The priority of beauty in the NPPF was always a difficult needle to thread. Not only is beauty inherently subjective but doesn’t take in to account local vernacular or what is appropriate for different areas. With adherence to design codes and local plans you are most likely to get a better result which isn’t held back by abstract national definitions.
“Ultimately it’s down to the developers who will need to deliver the housing after permissions are granted to build well-designed and high-quality housing.”
Ministers are also expected to make it easier for homeowners to build loft extensions and additional storeys to their properties under the changes to be set out on Thursday.
Proposals to drop the requirement for new homes to be “beautiful” were first announced by Rayner in July.
At the time Tory leader Kemi Badenoch criticised the move and warned the requirement would result in “ugly houses”.
She also said the requirement “means so much to local communities” and people “deserve to live in beautiful homes”.