London Assembly told that simple policy changes in London boroughs could help create 320,000 homes, reports Kumail Jaffer, Local Democracy Reporter
Onerous planning processes are preventing the capital from potentially adding 320,000 new homes across the capital by expanding buildings upwards, the London Assembly has been told.
Despite national planning policies being adjusted in recent years to encourage upward extensions – including explicitly permitting mansards on appropriate properties – relatively few Londoners have taken the opportunity, with a few hundred applications per year for half a million eligible properties in the city.
Experts have now told the London Assembly’s planning and regeneration committee that the lengthy planning process involved is putting residents off – and preventing the capital from seeing hundreds of thousands of extra dwellings being created during a housing shortage.
“Under the current planning and regulatory regime, I think the potential practically, not spatially, not physically, of upward extension remains uncomfortably modest,” Nicholas Boys-Smith, founder and chair of Create Streets, told assembly members.
“We’re getting 500 applications per year in London recently, it’s far too low.
“The amount of work involved, the risk of not getting planning permission, you know, the fact you need to pay planning consultants, architects, you need to spend probably tens of thousands of pounds before you know you’ve got those extra bedrooms or that extra flat on the top of a bigger building.
“That is what economists call, obviously, a barrier to entry, and it is working very well. Under the current situation, unless there’s some combination of national, GLA, and local borough change, which is doable, the potential is low.
“The good news is that if you make use of some quite simple fixes in the planning system, the spatial opportunity is immense.”
Boys-Smith said “low-end estimates” for the number of homes that doing that could create in London was about 140,000 – and the upper-end was 320,000. Essentially, he said, people could be adding an extra property on top of their own.
“Critically, and I really want to stress this point, the number of bedrooms is from 300,000 to 680,000,” he added. “The bedrooms really matter, even though I know it’s not in national housing targets, because bedrooms reduce homelessness.
“Spatially, the opportunity is there, but it does require planning and policy change. Change is needed to reach that opportunity.”
He said this was because permitted development rights (PDRs) have not worked as intended. The rights allow residents to add up to two storeys to the principal roof of an existing detached house, or one storey to a bungalow or terraced house, without needing a full planning application. However, a lack of “planning understanding” from local authority officials means that uptake has remained low.
“There was a very, very visible and sharp distinction between uptake for PDR that did and didn’t require prior approval,” he noted.
Instead, he recommended the mass rollout of local development orders (LDOs) and locally-developed design codes, both of which apply to a defined area within a borough. Last week Create Streets released a report suggesting that densification in South Tottenham, Chelsea and Tower Hamlets was primarily achieved due to clear design codes and local orders.
“The real game here is not big changes on big blocks of buildings,” he said. “The real, real opportunity here, if we as a polity and as a country wish to take it, is to allow streets organically to grow again in a way that are acceptable to the local population.
“You only see the exponential increase of additional bedrooms and homes when you have a local council coming in and turbo-charging it through an SPD [supplementary planning document] or LDO.”
Dr Charles Gillot, a senior sustainability engineer at WSP UK & Ireland, suggested changes to the National Policy Planning Framework (NPPF) had “not been a fantastic success” and that most upward extensions were being delivered on a larger scale rather than residents doing it to their own houses.
Experts also noted that the next London Plan should include clearer, city-wide guidance on upward extensions.
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