Splitting sites may help solve housing crisis

BRITAIN’S biggest developers could be told to hand over chunks of their building sites to smaller firms as part of measures being considered to help solve the country’s housing crisis, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.

A Government-appointed panel is understood to have found that the construction of homes is slowed down as a result of a high proportion of planning permissions being granted for large sites owned by single developers.

Sources said that the group, chaired by Sir Oliver Letwin, the Conservative MP, is examining ways sites could be split up to allow smaller firms to take over portions of the land on which they would build their own homes.

Some large firms are understood to have accepted they could “parcel out” more land to other companies. Sir Oliver is due to produce an interim report next month, outlining reasons for a large volume of planning permissions failing to materialise into homes.

An industry source said: “The planning system is bringing through too many very large sites and that ultimately affects buildout rates. It is something we have talked to Oliver Letwin about.” The cumbersome processes councils undergo to assess and grant consent for each development ultimately makes it “easier to build 1,000 homes over two sites than over 10 sites”, said the source.

Prof Christine Whitehead, one of five members of Sir Oliver’s panel, and emeritus professor of housing economics at the London School of Economics, hinted at the direction of the review at a conference last week.

“You need mixes of dwellings, you need mixes of tenure, you need mixes of developers in order to get large sites working,” Prof Whitehead told the National Planning Summit.