Localis response to the King’s Speech – July 17 2024
Localis chief executive, Jonathan Werran, said: “Legislative plans outlined in today’s King’s Speech to reintroduce strategic planning, could be a gamechanger for housing supply and ultimately help ‘take the brakes off Britain’.
“We urgently need planning reform to support good growth, but this needs to be balanced with the desperate need for some immediate stability to minimize disruption to developments and plans that are in progress.
“We have had four years of constant change which has led to the current stalemate across many parts of England and has resulted in poor outcomes as far as relatively few numbers of new homes built annually compared to need.
“Any reforms to planning will also have to be fully integrated with the Government’s infrastructure priorities and will need to be supported by better resources for local authorities to deliver on the ground the manifesto ambition for 1.5 million new homes over the lifetime of the parliament.
“The English Devolution Bill will give new powers to metro mayors and combined authorities to take control of buses and other vital powers from Westminster, which is to be welcomed.
“But as with this week’s earlier announcement from local government secretary Angela Rayner of a ‘devolution revolution’, this begs the question as to how and by when does the mission-led Labour government with a focus on growth plan fill in the gaps in the map and cover the whole of England, with a strategic devolution settlement?
“Beyond this, there is a need for clarity in the passage of the Bill as to how this reconfigured political economy for England and constitutional framework for the UK will harmonise with the new statutory local growth plans, how will these mesh with regional growth ambitions, and how in turn are they to be connected within the overarching ambit of a revived national industrial strategy.”