Almost 6,000 homes are still waiting to be built in Birmingham despite having planning permission for more than a year.
The shocking figure of land banked by developers has been revealed by the Birmingham City Council’s planning department in a response to Government plans to get them to release more land for .
This comes just hours after the city unveiled a outlining how it will reach target of 80,000 new homes as population is expected to soar by 150,000 over next 16 years.
The Government policy argues the complex planning process is holding back development and wants councils to earmark sites for housing in advance through new Local Development Orders (LDOs).
But in a robust response, the council’s planning committee said that it is land owners who are holding back the system by sitting on hundreds of sites with planning permission.
At its last annual audit, Birmingham had 345 sites, covering 58.6 hectares of land with detailed planning permission for 6,548 homes. Of those 270 sites, with capacity for 5,997 homes had planning permission for more than a year – with no work started.
Committee member John Clancy (Lab, Quinton) said: “There’s a chorus from government and developers that we are the problem, that the reason houses aren’t being built is because planning authorities make it really difficult to get planning permission.
“Well the killer fact in this document is the amount of planning permission granted on brownfield sites, and after a year nothing has happened. Over 90 per cent of the houses we’ve given planning permission to have still not started after a year.
Most Read
“The unwillingnes of developers to proceed now, to hold on to land for whatever purpose, is quite clearly where the issue is.”
He called on the Government to offer a ‘use it or lose it’ policy which would see land developed by the council or someone else if there is no progress.
Fellow committee member Peter Douglas Osborn (Cons, Weoley) suggested the council could be more lenient over developer conditions– such as cash for road improvements or local facilities.
He said: “I wonder whether the overheads that stack up in terms of our planning conditions are too onerous for the market.”
And he pointed out that the Icknield Port development in Ladywood, which has permission for almost 1,000 homes is council owned and has had permission for several years.
Chief planning officer Richard Goulborn added that the while they welcome attempts to encourage development they believe the Government’s proposals were “seriously flawed”.
He added that an LDO to cover the whole of Birmingham, as suggested in the Government consultation, would not work as it would not reflect local ‘complexities’ which would require more bespoke development.