Right to Build Registers:Are they working?

August 2019

New research from MyPlot has revealed the hugely different approaches local authorities across the North West are taking to monitoring – and meeting – the demand for self-build housing plots.

As part of efforts to tackle the housing crisis, the government is working to increase the number of self-build homes delivered from around 12,000 each year to 20,000. To support that objective a new Right to Build was introduced in 2016 which gave local authorities two new responsibilities.

The first of those is to maintain a Right to Build Register – effectively a list of all those people who want to build their own home in the borough. Second is the “duty to grant planning permission” - councils are required to approve enough planning applications for self-build plots to meet the identified need within three years of people joining their register.

MyPlot has contacted all 38 local planning authorities in the North West to see how they are dealing with those new requirements. 31 (82%) of them responded and revealed dramatically differing understandings of what the obligations are, as well as a wide variety of approaches for dealing with them.

Introduction

The Number of Self-Builders

Keeping a Right to Build Register is relatively straightforward and something that every local authority in the North West is doing. Between them, the 31 councils report that there are some 2,079 people who have registered an interest in building their own homes – an average of just over 67 per council. The figures vary widely across the region, with 372 people on the register in Cheshire West and Chester, and nobody on the register in West Lancashire.

That doesn’t mean nobody actually wants to build their own home in West Lancashire. At one stage, there were 36 people on their register, but the council decided to introduce the “local connection” and “financial competence” tests allowed by legislation in 2017 which saw numbers fall. Despite that reduction, the council do say that self-build is “a good thing that we need to support.”

2,079 people are listed on Right to Build registers across the North West of England.

The West Lancashire example points to a systemic problem with the Right to Build Registers – as councils are allowed to impose tests like this, the registers are likely to undercount the true level of demand. People who want to build their own home are, typically, expecting to live in it for a long time and it is not at all unreasonable to expect that may well come with a geographic relocation too.

Local Authority Right to Build Register EntriesBarrow-in-Furness 10

Blackburn with Darwen 13Blackpool 1

Bolton 115Burnley 17

Bury 102Carlisle 12

Cheshire East 166Cheshire West and Chester 372

Chorley 12Copeland 15

Eden 74Fylde 41

Halton 7Hyndburn 2Lancaster 30Liverpool 79

Manchester 293Pendle 183Preston 28

Rossendale 14Salford 33Sefton 144

South Lakeland 52

South Ribble 29St Helens 7Stockport 79Trafford 130

West Lancashire 0Wigan 14Wyre 5

TOTAL 2,079

The Number of Plots Needed

The picture gets more complicated when it comes to identifying the number of self-build plots that planning permission should be granted for.

In part, this is because the obligations on councils are somewhat difficult to interpret. For example, the duty to grant planning permission means councils have three years to consent enough self-build plots to meet the number of new entrants on the Right to Build Register in the 12 months prior to that.

So, if 50 people joined the register in the year to October 2017, the council would have to grant planning permission for 50 self-build plots by October 2020. But in reality, more than those 50 plots would need to be delivered over tha period - October 2020 would also be the end of the second year in which to deliver a plot for people joining the register between October 2017 and October 2018.

Confused? So are many local councils.

There was confusion amongst councils as to how to calculate the number of self-build plots that needed to be delivered - if they knew they had to do it at all.

While some local authorities had really clear data on what was needed by when – in many cases even including it within annual monitoring reports – there were many examples where that was not the case. One council claimed to have “no specific self-build targets” – a position repeated by a number of other local authorities across the region.

Monitoring the number of self-build plots actually being delivered is also proving difficult for councils. That’s largely because there is no definitive way of doing it - there is no “self-build” tick box on planning application forms, for example.

Self-build homes are exempt from Community Infrastructure Levy so the most accurate way of keeping track of numbers is to record how many plots are granted relief from CIL on that basis. However, in the North West only eight councils have a CIL regime in place so most have to consider other options.

Many of the councils that responded to our survey highlighted the difficulties with collecting accurate data. Some confessed that they don’t actually monitor the number of self-build plots at all, whilst others quoted the number of planning permissions for single plots. One council even suggested that “in theory any planning permission for housing development could be suitable for custom and self-build.”

Whilst approaches like that are understandable, they are contrary to how the Right to Build requirements are being interpreted by Planning Inspectors (see the case study on the next page for one example).

Planning permission is being granted for around 14% of the number of self-build plots actually required.

The uncertainty over both how many self-build plots need to be delivered, and how many actually are means it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions on the balance between supply and demand. What is clear, though, is that number of plots being delivered is far below the number of people listed on Right to Build registers. The best estimate is that something in the order of 14% of the required plots are actually being delivered.

Delivery of Self-Build Plots

A recent appeal decision1 relating to a site in the village of Woodville in North West Leicestershire considered exactly what types of planning permission could be counted towards Right to Build targets.

The local authority believed that the 133 planning permissions it had granted for single plots was more than enough to satisfy their obligations as there were only 54 people on their Right to Build register.

However, the Inspector concluded that there was nothing to ensure that the vast majority of those would actually be delivered as self-build plots - they could just as easily be built by developers and sold as completed homes. In his view, there were only 4 plots in the borough that met the legal definition of custom and self-build housing.

As a consequence, he allowed the appeal for 30 homes on a greenfield site outside the settlement boundary of the village as the developer accepted an obligation that the homes could only be delivered for custom or self-build.

1 Appeal reference APP/G2435/W/18/3214451

Woodville: a case study

Whenever new planning requirements are introduced, there is a period of adaption and adjustment. Local authorities need to learn how best to deal with it, and different interpretations of the new requirements are tested through planning appeals and court judgements. The Right to Build is still in its infancy and this research reveals that we’re still going through that learning phase.

There are, though, some clear lessons we can learn.

Firstly, we need to consider how well Right to Build registers actually measure demand. The use of local residency tests, for example, seems to have the potential to under-estimate the true level of aspiration.

It would appear that some local authorities need to keep clearer data as to the number of self-build plots that are required in each monitoring period. Related to that is the need for a more accurate way of measuring self-build plot numbers. This might be done by using planning obligations to limit particular plots to a custom or self-build delivery.

Finally, we need ways of ensuring planning permission is granted for more self-build plots. Although the data is a little sketchy, it would appear that only 14% of the required number of plots are being delivered. Many councils confirmed that they were looking to address this through emerging local plans – by introducing self-build specific planning policies, or requiring a proportion of plots on larger sites to be made available for that purpose.

For the 2,079 people on their Right to Build registers, those changes can’t come soon enough.

Conclusions

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