With the recent changes to planning policy, the Labour government is attempting to deliver a mammoth project of 1.5 million homes, a number far higher than what the conservative government built.

In the 2019 Conservative manifesto, the Tories pledged to build at least 1 million new homes over the following parliament and 300,000 new homes per year by the mid-2020s.

Prior to the election in July, Rishi Sunak stated – perhaps conveniently – that the Conservative government had delivered almost record numbers of houses each year for the previous three years. In 2022 under the Conservative government, 178,010 houses were built, which indeed was the highest figure since the late 1980s.

The number of houses built per year still falls far below the yearly target of 300,000 net new homes. This is where unclarified statistics can be misleading. The 300,000 figure accounts for net new homes which includes conversions of other buildings into new dwellings. However, even when using this net dwelling metric, according to government official statistics on housing supply, annual supply over the previous financial year totalled 221,070, a decrease of 6% on 2022-23 and indeed a number far below the 300,000 targets. Despite Rishi Sunak’s optimism the Conservative government fell short both of delivering adequate housing supply and delivering for nature.

As Labour pushes forward with their ambitious plan to deliver 1.5 million new homes over the next parliament several questions are spawned:

• Given the practical, planning and physical constraints of development, will Labour be able to deliver where no government has since the 1950s?
• Can the government stay within its carbon budget whilst doing so?
• And will there be a positive contribution to nature's recovery?

Matthew Pennycook, Minister of State (Housing, Communities and Local Government), and Angela Rayner, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, certainly believe the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ to all three.

Despite, as Pennycook put it, the “assault on housing planning” brought in by the previous government, Rayner has confirmed that the government will be able to both deliver housing and protect wildlife – it is not either or - “we can do both”.

Concerningly, the rhetoric from Starmer, with his assault on environmental voices and the so-called alliance of naysayers, suggests Labour’s views are not concerned with wildlife in the way that we would hope.

Changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) concerning greenbelt revaluation perhaps confirm these fears. From 12 December 2024, local councils have 12 weeks to update their local plans for housing such that they align with the new NPPF.

The recent changes to the NPPF reintroduce mandatory targets for housing, obligate reviews of green belt boundaries, and force councils to provide concrete demonstrations of what areas of land will be concreted over.

Across our three counties all but two of our councils must massively increase their building targets with West Berkshire forecast to increase its building output by 116.2% compared to previous targets.

Adding to the turbulence in the planning world, the government has also launched a working paper on Development and Nature Recovery. This aims to create a more centralised approach to delivering environmental obligations by moving away from multiple project specific assessments of environmental impacts to a more strategic approach at a larger geographical scale.

The government appears not to be reducing environmental protections already in legislation but simply changing and streamlining the means through which environmental obligations are achieved. By granting greater powers to public bodies, such as Natural England (whose resources are already stretched thinly), to oversee delivery and using funding from developers, the government is seeking to make it easier for developers to discharge their environmental obligations. 

This strategic approach, however, is not without its pitfalls. The proposal for species licenses provided to developers for a fee rather than proper surveying of land will likely come at a cost to many species as it assumes that environmental record centres are perfectly up to date and no new surveys are required, whilst large-scale delivery plans for nutrient mitigation overlook the inherent complexity in calculating efficient offsetting of negative externalities from non-point source pollutants.

Hopeful though this plan appears, problems of this ilk cast doubt on the optimism of the ‘win-win’ for developers and nature that the paper repeatedly refers to.

If these 1.5 million homes are to be built, without serious alterations to the principles of development, the prospect of protecting the climate and nature will quickly drift into fantasy.

In addition to the NPPF changes which permit greater areas of land to be defined as ‘grey belt’ land, researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Kent and Exeter predict that, if the government continues its business-as-usual building strategy, UK housing development alone will consume its entire cumulative carbon budget by 2050.

A striking and concerning calculation that leaves one wondering how the government plans to deliver both for its people and for wildlife in the way that Angela Rayner proposes.

The key number in all of this appears to by 1.5: 1.5 million new homes, but it also looks as though we might need 1.5 times the green belt space and 1.5 times our carbon budget.

The environmental audit committee passionately believes that these three crises – housing, nature, climate - must be tackled in tandem and are currently reviewing the NPPF to assess if this is feasible. The first oral evidence session of this committee is on Wednesday 15 January to review how the government’s plans may affect environmental protections.

If this committee finds that Labour’s pledges to housing and nature are in fact in conflict, this raises the question: will Starmer, Rayner and Pennycook alter their plan considering this knowledge or continue development regardless of its impacts on nature and climate?