New housebuilding report shows nature not a blocker

A new housebuilding report – published this week by by Key Cities – called Turbocharging Housebuilding in Cities and Urban Areas shows that nature is not a major blocker.

Despite the Government’s rhetoric that nature is a blocker on housebuilding, the report highlights that “costs and finance”, “land availability”, “developer delays” and “skills shortages” all come ahead of issues relating to the “planning system”. See the replicated statistics below.

And even then, issues relating to nature will only be a small portion of the issues arising from the planning system.

CIEEM continues to engage with Government and other stakeholders on how to move forward with the Planning and Infrastructure Bill (PIB) so that we can achieve wins for both nature and development. We maintain that restricting Part 3 of the PIB to diffuse impacts will benefit developers and nature. This would address the bigger strategic issues that developers struggle to deal with on a site-by-site basis, and at the same time remove the wide open opportunities for abuse of Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs).