Housing: North of England
(asked on 21st June 2022) - View Source
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what (a) short- and (b) long-term plans his Department has to tackle the demand for housing in the north of England, particularly in urban centres.
Answered by
Stuart Andrew
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
The Levelling Up White Paper marked an important moment: making clear the scale of our ambition to address inequalities for communities right across the country. Through our planning reforms local leaders will have greater powers to improve town centres, bring land and property into productive use and use the planning system to deliver the beautiful and sustainable homes their communities want.
We have announced £10 billion investment in housing supply since the start of this Parliament, with our housing supply interventions due to ultimately unlock over 1 million new homes over the Spending Review 2021 period and beyond. This includes an additional £1.8 billion investment announced at Spending Review 2021. We have also launched the £1.5 billion Levelling Up Home Building Fund, which will provide loans to small and medium sized builders and developers to deliver 42,000 homes.
We have also introduced a range of national permitted development rights which support housing delivery. These include rights which allow change of use of commercial buildings such as shops and offices to residential use, and rights which allow existing commercial and residential buildings to extend upwards by two additional storeys to create new homes and extra living space. We have also introduced a new permitted development right to allow vacant commercial, industrial and residential blocks to be demolished and replaced with new residential units.
In December 2020 we changed the formula to increase housing need by 35% in our 20 most populated urban areas, to maximise use of existing infrastructure and to support development that reduces the need for high-carbon travel. A number of these are in the North of England - including Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Bradford.