New Neighbourhood Planning Bill will speed up growth and housebuilding

The new Neighbourhood Planning Bill will speed up and strengthen the neighbourhood planning process.

The Housing and Planning Minister has announced that the Neighbourhood Planning Bill will support more housebuilding and give communities the opportunity to have their say on future developments.

The plan will speed up and strengthen the popular neighbourhood planning process, by simplifying how plans can be revised as local circumstances change, and ensuring that there is no time wasted in the work beginning once approved by the local people.

Housing and Planning Minister Gavin Barwell said: “The Prime Minister has been absolutely clear that we need to build more homes and this Bill is the first of a number of measures to deliver on that.

“We have already built more than 900,000 homes since 2010 and now this Bill will help speed up delivery of the further new homes our country needs and ensure our foot is still firmly on the pedal.

“We’re also going further than ever before to speed up neighbourhood planning which puts power in the hands of local people to decide where development gets built.”

The compulsory purchase order process, which can be essential in delivering big and complex schemes, will be simplified, to make it clearer, faster and fairer. The process can be complex and uncertain, but with new measures in the bill, the process which is currently based on a patchwork of statute and case law, will become much fairer for all parties.

Further Bill measures will ensure that planning conditions which require developers to take action before work starts are only used where strictly necessary, but in a way that ensures important heritage and environmental safeguards remain in place, so that once a developer has planning permission they can get on and start building as soon as possible.

The government have pledged to boost housebuilding, with the ambition of delivering one million new homes and a doubling of the housing budget to £20Bn.

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