After much deliberation and clashing between the House of Commons and House of Lords, the Housing and Planning Act received Royal Assent on Thursday 12 May. The date also marked the formal end of this year’s parliamentary session, meaning the Bill was made an Act of Parliament at the last available opportunity of the 2015-2016 session. Had the Bill not been passed it would have been subject to further debate in the 2016-2017 parliamentary session (beginning Wednesday 18 May), a scenario which would have caused somewhat of a headache to the Government and jeopardised its ability to stick to manifesto commitments.

The Bill was passed following the withdrawal of Lord Bob Kerslake’s (a crossbench peer) amendment to the Government’s Starter Homes proposals – Lord Kerslake wanted local authorities to have the power to decide what form of affordable housing to provide. The Government’s proposed nationwide 20% Starter Homes threshold was met with the most resistance from the House of Lords during the Bill’s passage through Parliament.

Despite the Bill being subject to lengthy ‘ping-pong’ between the two houses, the Government’s initiatives remain largely intact. The key points of the Act are:

Home ownership

• Extension of Right-to-Buy level discounts to housing association tenants.
• Starter Homes introduced as an affordable housing category on new build developments. 200,000 are due to be delivered before 2020.
• A duty placed on local planning authorities to actively promote the development of Starter Homes.
• Provisions requiring councils to consider the sale of their vacant housing assets.

Building

• Unlocking of brownfield land, requiring local authorities to prepare, maintain and publish local registers of specified land.
• ‘Permission in Principle’ (PiP) – an automatic consent for sites, subject to the adoption of key qualifying documents such as a development plan (the RTPI helped secure a key amendment in the House of Lords which clarified and restricted the ‘qualifying documents’ to local plans, registers and neighbourhood plans).
• Doubling the number of custom-built and self-built homes to 20,000 by 2020.
• Continuing to ensure every area has a local plan in place.
• Reforming the compulsory purchase process to make it clearer, faster and fairer.

Housing management

• Requiring social tenants on higher incomes to pay fairer rents (dubbed ‘pay-to-stay’).
• More powers to local authorities to tackle rogue landlords.
• Reducing the regulatory controls for private registered providers of housing to increase their freedoms.

The Government will be keen to kick start the building process as soon as possible. The promise of 200,000 Starter Homes by 2020 is ambitious to say the least – indeed, the British Property Federation has rightly expressed concern about the lack of regulations to be laid out (the technical consultation on the regulations to support the Starter Homes Clause is due to finish on Wednesday 18 May), with this having the potential to negatively impact the proposed timeframe.

With the new parliamentary session set to begin, further announcements are to be expected, with the Queens speech on Wednesday 18 May likely to lay out additional planning measures.