Planning permission isn’t housing delivery

There is a point in many developments where nothing is fundamentally wrong with the scheme, but it stops moving as it should. Demand is there, the site works, there is appetite to fund it and planning may already be secured. Somewhere between consent and completion, though, momentum starts to disappear, and we’re seeing more of that.

Part of the problem is that planning, funding, regulation, technical requirements and construction tend to be discussed separately, when for a developer they are all part of the same project. A technical or regulatory issue can delay the programme and add finance and preliminary costs, while a subsequent design change might need further consideration from building control, the warranty provider, lender or investor.

Very often, none of this is particularly serious on its own. It’s the accumulation that causes the difficulty and by the time the impact starts showing up in the programme or appraisal, the original problem can be much harder and more expensive to deal with.

This is where I think some of the debate around housing delivery misses a step. Planning reform matters, but securing permission and actually delivering the homes are two different things, and what happens after planning has become more complicated too.

The Building Safety Act has changed project sequencing for higher-risk buildings, construction costs continue to put pressure on viability and lenders, investors and insurers all have their own requirements. Any one of those can influence design, programme, funding or exit.

This isn’t to suggest that development has somehow become too difficult, but it does mean more of these conversations need to happen earlier, when there is still time to do something about them. In our experience, the projects that maintain momentum aren’t necessarily those with the fewest risks; they tend to be the ones where the risks and dependencies have been understood early enough for the development team to retain some flexibility in how they respond.

We see that across traditional housing, build-to-rent, purpose-built student accommodation and regeneration projects. The economics and ownership models are different, but the same issue comes up repeatedly: a decision made in one part of a development can have an unexpected commercial consequence somewhere else.

It also raises a wider question about what we mean by housing delivery. Clearly, we need to build more homes, but the number completed can’t be the only measure that matters. Those homes also need to remain safe, mortgageable and fit for purpose long after they have appeared in the completion figures.

That means getting the technical side of delivery right as well. Problems picked up after occupation are almost always more disruptive and expensive to resolve than problems identified while a development is still being designed or built.

Technical inspection, building control and structural warranty all play a part in that, but they do different jobs. Inspection can identify issues while work is still accessible, while building control and warranty have different purposes and requirements. Understanding those requirements and coordinating them during design and construction is considerably easier than trying to establish a route to sign-off as practical completion approaches.

The same principle applies more broadly across a development. Risk is part of property development and always will be; what matters is understanding where it sits, what else it might affect and dealing with it at a point when the project team still has choices available.

We’ve spent a lot of time as an industry talking about how many homes we need and how many planning permissions are required to get there. Both matter, but there is another part of the equation that perhaps gets less attention: how many viable schemes actually make it from consent to occupation, and what causes otherwise good developments to lose momentum along the way?

If we’re serious about increasing housing delivery, that gap deserves considerably more attention.