Government has made ‘little progress’ on nutrient neutrality and incentives for councils, says Housing Forum

The government must do more to resource planning, reform nutrient neutrality rules and incentivise local authorities to hit targets, the Housing Forum has said in its one-year review of the Labour administration.

In 2024, the body published a ‘roadmap to 1.5m’, which set out its recommendations for how the government could meet its goals.

A year into the new government, it has published an update, identifying where progress has been made and where more work is required.

The report was broadly positive about the government’s achievements, identifying ‘good’ progress on 13 of its recommendations, ‘some’ progress on 10, and ‘little’ progress on six.

Many of its recommendations last year have been addressed through reform to the National Planning Policy Framework, the planning and infrastructure bill, and the package for housing announced in the spending review, which included £39bn for social and affordable housing, a National Housing Bank, and a 10-year rent settlement for housing associations. 

The Housing Forum said there had been ‘some’ progress on addressing planning, but said that “there remains a need to address the status of planners, recruitment and retention and to drive up performance via improved monitoring” and that it was “unclear where the additional funding” for the government’s commitment to 300 new planning officers will come from. 

On areas where little progress had been made, the body urged the government to introduce financial incentives for councils to meet their targets, tackle the nutrient neutrality issue, remove VAT from retrofit, encourage local authorities to use compulsory purchase powers and update income thresholds for shared ownership.

It also identified delays at the Building Safety Regulator as “one new issue [that] has emerged, which wasn’t foreseen”.

“The Government must ensure that the Regulator is adequately staffed, and that applicants receive the feedback they need in a timely manner to ensure a higher and faster rate of approval in future,” it said.

Chair of The Housing Forum, Stephen Teagle, said: “The Government should be applauded for an unprecedented focus in its first year on putting the building blocks in place to enable new housing to be delivered. 

“The strong progress on planning and on giving the social housing sector more security of long-term funding are welcome and vitally needed to enable us to deliver more homes and sustain the quality of our communities. 

>> Read more: At-a-glance: What we know about the £39bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme so far

“We will now work closely with MHCLG on unblocking the delays at the Building Safety Regulator and rolling out the Future Homes Standards. 

“The housing sector must now grasp the opportunity, find ways to overcome remaining challenges and build the homes that are needed for the future.”

The report said that the scale of the challenge in building 1.5 million new homes in five years remained “immense”.

In 2024/25, 199,300 new homes were completed in England, with new starts falling 28% in the same period, suggesting completions will not begin to pick up this year.

“The government will therefore need to aim for a sharp upward trajectory in the following three years,” it said.

The Housing Forum gave an example of what building 1.3m homes over the remaining four years might look like, setting out a gradual ramp up to build 450,000 homes in 2028/29.

This would smash previous records, with home completions in the UK hitting highs of around 400,000 in the late 1960s.