Comment from Carl Dyer, Head of Planning at Irwin Mitchell

According to Carl Dyer, Head of Planning at Irwin Mitchell, the Chancellor's Budget today, "... was as expected, the usual rattle of cans being kicked down the street, and of failed policies being recycled.
 
"The 300,000 homes a year target is an aspiration for the "mid-2020's. That figure needs to be seen in context: the 217,000 figure cited about house built this year includes 40,000 conversions.  The average for the last seven years has been 159,000 a year!"
 
"Yet again, we see a Chancellor targeting the wrong end of the housing market: help for first time buyers, but not a word about retirement living, down sizing or the need for more care homes."
 
Dyer continues, "If just half the people thinking of down sizing had retirement homes to down size to, that would deliver 3,500,000 homes onto the market.  Not only that encouraging retirement housing on brown field sites is a lot less controversial politically than building on cherished green fields. 
 
"The proposed extension of the Help to Buy scheme will only inflate house prices at the bottom end if the market- It will not of itself increase the supply of housing.
 
"Similarly the headline grabbing scrapping of Stamp Duty for first time buyers will be capitalised into house prices before the year is out.
 
"Once again, there was a hint of four new garden cities as part of the solution to the housing shortage. But as Dyer continued; "The great thing about new towns is that everyone can envisage them conveniently "somewhere else". At some point they will have to be brought forward somewhere, and when that happens the residents of that somewhere will dig trenches and fill sand bags and erect their barbed wire to keep them out.- And the history of the last few decades tells us that they will probably win!"
 
"Detailed planning measures are to be part of an announcement by Sajid Javed, whose track record - as highlighted by Irwin Mitchell research - does not suggest a willingness to support house building in the seats of Conservative MP's.
 
"We had an announcement of double council tax for "empty properties". But what is an empty property? A holiday home? A home being refurbished? An easy shot at a Straw Man.
 
"And then of course there was the cheap pot at developers alleged to be land banking housing planning permissions. Similar charges used to be fashionable against retailers. Every time anyone has investigated land banking, they have found that the delays were inherent in the system: when councils routinely impose 40 or 50 planning conditions on every significant permission it takes time to get schemes off the ground. Oliver Letwin is to be the latest now to be asked to look "urgently" at this - and report by next spring...
 
"Meanwhile, the Green Belt - including all the. brown field parts of it - remains sacrosanct. Of course it does: it's mostly in Conservative Party seats. Targeting new housing in urban areas makes it so conveniently on the other side of the borough boundary for most of the government's supporters.
 
"All in all- Very disappointing."