CPRE responds to Planning and Infrastructure Bill

In response to the new Planning and Infrastructure Bill Roger Mortlock, chief executive of CPRE, the Countryside Charity said: ‘This Bill needs to incentivise and supercharge a different model for delivering the affordable homes people need. The answer lies as much in transforming the market as it does in planning reform. Without it we will see yet more unaffordable, car-dependent developments built across our countryside.  

‘Big housebuilders have a stranglehold on UK housing supply, delivering poor-quality, identikit housing painfully slowly, while the tired ‘builders and blockers’ rhetoric falsely pitches communities against economic growth.  

‘The government should take this opportunity to create a new generation of sustainable homes, starting with the 1 million homes that have planning permission but have not been built and then then by building on the shovel ready sites that could deliver 1.2 million more. 

‘The brownfield passports introduced in this Bill will help development on previously used land. Though without meaningful targets for delivery, many of these potential new homes will remain unbuilt.’