Government accused of having ‘rogue algorithm' for deciding housing targets

Independent

29-01-2025

The Government has a 'rogue algorithm' for determining housing targets, a Conservative former minister has said.
Damian Hinds told MPs that the number of houses expected to be built in his constituency of East Hampshire had 'doubled' as a result of calculations that place 'too much emphasis towards building in the countryside'.
The Government has pledged to build 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament, and last month announced a shake-up of planning rules that will see mandatory building targets for councils in England.
The revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) sets out the Government's planning policies and how these are expected to be applied.
In a Westminster Hall debate on Wednesday, Mr Hinds said: 'I believe that the new formula, there is too much emphasis towards building in the countryside, which will be bad for economic growth, bad for our decarbonisation agenda and of course injurious to the countryside and I'm going to ask the Government to look again at that formula.'
He said: 'The new formula, the Government gives an overall 50% uplift in housing numbers, but in many areas, it goes up by a lot more than that and in my area, East Hampshire, our target goes up from 575 to 1,142, an increase of 98%, let's just call it doubling.'
Citing data from the Commons library, Mr Hinds said that of 58 mainly or largely rural local authorities, two-thirds had a target increase of over 50% and the average increase was 71%.
He said: 'The formula, I'm sure, looked logical when it was done on paper or on the computer screen I'm sure it was and done for the right reasons, but it has in practice delivered perverse outcomes which will reduce the amount of housing development in urban areas, will harm growth and will be extremely difficult to deliver, certainly impossible I would say, to deliver sustainably in the countryside.
'It's an errant algorithm, a rogue algorithm and we know what that feels like because that happened when we were in Government too, it can happen to anyone.
'The important thing is when you spot it the best thing to do is address it as quickly as possible.'
Labour MP for Hexham Joe Morris said the debate should be 'less about rural housing targets and more about rural homes' as young people moved to urban areas to secure housing.
He said: 'It's one of the sadnesses of the job actually that you do not see communities thriving as much as they could have done because they are having young people forced to leave communities that need them.'
He added: 'Rural depopulation is a major concern and something that I think transcends party politics.'
Later in the debate, Mr Morris intervened on Tory shadow housing minister Paul Holmes to say it would be 'cynical to say that it would be the death of rural England to build more houses'.
Mr Holmes replied: 'What I'm saying is that the Government's algorithm is making it easier to build huge numbers of houses in rural England where that infrastructure is harder to deliver, while generally Labour councils in urban centres are having their targets cut.'
Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George (St Ives) said Sir Keir Starmer's pledge to back 'builders not blockers' is a 'false dichotomy'.
He said: 'The fundamental failing of decades of setting housing targets in the ways that successive governments have is that it's both wrongly conceived and also based on a naive delusion.
'It's a naive delusion that private developers would be willing to collude with the Government in driving down the price of their completed product.
'It's a naive delusion to which I'm afraid you find adherence in all political parties who have adopted this view for decades, that they believe that if we build enough the price will come down and the developers will co-operate with us in doing that and that has simply not happened.'
Housing minister Matthew Pennycook said the country is in the grip of an 'acute and entrenched housing crisis'.
He said: 'Local authorities must use the standard method as the basis for determining housing requirements in their local plans.
'However we made clear that a mandatory method is insufficient if the method itself is not adequate to meet housing needs.
'That's why our revised NPPF implements a new standard method for assessing housing needs that aligns with our ambitions for 1.5 million new homes in this Parliament.
'We do think that the new standard strikes the right balance and indeed we adjusted it from the proposals we consulted on last July in response to significant feedback.'