Lee Barnard, CEO at Denbury Homes:
“The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is out for consultation until 10 March. As a company we see many of the measures in the draft policy as positive steps towards easing the burden on planning departments. These departments have, in recent years, been under-resourced and faced with an increasingly onerous bureaucratic burden so any measures to alleviate these pressures should be welcomed.
“The NPPF, will become the manual which is uppermost on the desks of planning officers. Denbury Homes works hard to propose developments that are appropriate for an area, so we are not fearful of planning applications being refused. But in recent years some of our most popular developments have been dogged by delay. Giving overstretched officers readily accessible guidance should help reduce these bottlenecks.
“We have long held that the key to unlocking the housing crisis is to put greater emphasis on delivering the right homes in the right places, so we applaud that the new NPPF seeks to address this. Councils are mandated to deliver homes, but the actual mechanics of delivery are down to developers. Creating clarity in the policy environment will go some way to reducing administrative obstacles that can hinder housing growth. The NPPF attempts to offer this clarity and should reduce confusion caused by irrelevant legislation.
“In recent years there has been a proliferation of roles such as landscape, heritage, ecology, administrative and environmental officials rather than the more urgently required housing officers. These consultative roles all add to the expectation on developers to supply ever more information, this translates to additional administrative and financial burdens on them and delays planning applications still further. The new NPPF aims to reduce this expectation and streamline the process whilst still safeguarding heritage, landscape and ecology. This should speed up planning decisions by reducing the volume of information required from housebuilders whilst still restricting poorly designed development. Requirements to incorporate adaptions to climate change will ensure development resilience progressively improves as we move towards a net zero future.”
