The initial recommendations of a report on the state of the housing market has been submitted to the housing minister, Matthew Pennycook by Dame Kate Barker. Chair of Radix Housing Commission, Ms Barker is an economist and author of the Barker Review of Housing Supply in 2004.
The report was commissioned by the last Labour government, during Tony Blair’s tenure from 1997 and 2010.
In her letter to the government, Ms Barker said Home Builders Federation research showed that, “despite unusually strong support from many in the sector”, only eleven of the 36 recommendations in the original report had been implemented.
The research concluded that:
England would have 2 million more homes today if the Barker Review’s most ambitious scenario for increasing housing supply had been achieved.
This shortfall is equivalent to the entire housing stock of Ireland, or the number of homes in the urban areas of Manchester and Birmingham combined.
Looking at Barker’s central housing supply scenario (requiring 240,000 homes to be built a year), England has still fallen 900,000 homes short of the total number needed to make the market more affordable over the past 20 years.
Only 11 of the 36 recommendations of the Barker Review are currently in place – with a further 10 having only been partially implemented. 5 recommendations were implemented and then reversed.
The recent changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) undermined progress in implementing 3 of the Barker Review’s recommendations – those relating to targets, the allocation of land by local authorities, and the Green Belt.
Most indicators of housing affordability have worsened over the past twenty years since the Review’s publication.
Ms Barker wrote: “In particular, there has been a failure to link new housing with infrastructure delivery and also, since the financial crisis, a further decline in the supply of new social rent homes.”
Her letter calls for the reinstatement of the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit to support “a more robust approach” to achieve longer term housing targets, which should be distributed to each local planning authority and mandated at “strategic level”. She stood by current methods of establishing housing targets, which would “facilitate a speedy completion of current local plan reviews”.
A full report will follow in the autumn focusing on four “distinct but connected” issues:
- how to make more land available for development;
- the role of specialist housing, i.e, for students and older people;
- approaches to sustainability; and
- ensuring affordability.