Boris Johnson's planning shake-up will lead to more substandard developments, says Yorkshire MP Clive Betts

New regulations announced by the Government yesterday will give greater freedom for buildings and land in town centres to change use without planning permission and create new homes from the regeneration of vacant and redundant buildings.

The changes were revealed by the Prime Minister in a major speech where he promised to end the nation's long-term failure to build enough homes as part of a so-called 'new deal' to help the economy recover from the pandemic.

In a radical liberalisation of the planning system described as "ambitious and very welcome" by one Yorkshire Tory MP, new laws taking effect in September would mean builders would not need a normal planning application to demolish and rebuild vacant and redundant residential and commercial buildings if they are rebuilt as homes.

Buildings used for retail could be permanently used as a café or office without requiring a planning application and local authority approval, though certain buildings such as pubs and village shops are exempt as they are considered "essential to the lifeblood of communities".

After decades of the UK failing to build enough homes, the Government says the changes will support the high street revival by allowing empty commercial properties to be quickly repurposed and reduce the pressure to build on green fields land by making brownfield development easier.

Separately, both West Yorkshire and the Sheffield City Region were handed a share of a new £400 million fund aimed at creating more homes on brownfield land, with West Yorkshire getting £67m.

Calderdale council leader Tim Swift said the funding would help deliver thousands of homes and showed the West Yorkshire devolution deal signed in March was "already delivering for our communities".

But there was criticism after it emerged that a £12bn fund to support up to 180,000 new affordable homes being built for ownership and rent would now be spent over eight years, not five.

In a wide-ranging speech yesterday, Mr Johnson likened the impact of the coronavirus pandemic to a flash of lightning which had left people waiting "with our hearts in our mouths for the full economic reverberations to appear".

As part of his efforts to "tackle this country’s great unresolved challenges of the last three decades" including the country's glaring regional inequalities, he promised to build "at a pace that this moment requires".

Mr Johnson told the audience in Dudley that his infrastructure revolution" would help end the long-term failure to build enough homes.

He said: "We will build fantastic new homes on brownfield sites and other areas that with better transport and other infrastructure could frankly be suitable and right for development and address that intergenerational injustice and help young people get on the housing ladder in the way that their parents and grandparents could.

"And it is to galvanise this whole process that this government will shortly bring forward the most radical reforms of our planning system since the end of the second world war."

But his speech, which included promises to speed up the delivery of capital investments worth £5bn in hospitals, schools and roads, was described by the think-tank IPPR North as "deeply disappointing".

Director Sarah Longlands said it "merely reheats existing announcements and does little to ‘level up’ power and resources across the UK".

A senior Liberal Democrat councillor in York, a city with a longstanding housing crisis, said the PM had "only listened to the developers and business who simply want to gut the [planning] system to remove local decision making and accountability".

And the IPPR think-tank said his proposal to loosen planning restrictions so commercial properties can be converted to residential homes "puts the future delivery of affordable homes at risk and will accelerate the hollowing out of communities and the decline of the high street".

Kevin Hollinrake, Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake said the new planning approach was "absolutely the child of our time". He described it on Twitter as being "ambitious and very welcome".

But Sheffield MP and chair of the Commons housing committee Clive Betts said: "Once again we got the old repeated promise to reform the planning system which in practice will mean taking away from local communities the right to have a say in what is built in their areas and leading to more substandard and badly planned developments."

The Labour MP added: "The reality is that there are hundreds of thousands of planning permissions already given in this country for homes that could be built tomorrow but where developers have yet to put a spade in the ground.

"Of course, we need new development in our town and city centres, but allowing the odd conversion of shops into homes will not solve the housing crisis nor improve the appearance and attractiveness of the centres as places to visit.

"They will lead to a hotch-potch of unattractive development when what many of the centres need is wholesale regeneration and improvement in a planned and co-ordinated way."

Roger Marsh, chair of the Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership, welcomed the new planning rules but said they should be "swiftly aligned" with the Government's 'levelling-up' agenda by giving northern areas more access to housing infrastructure funding.

Efforts to make it easier to build more homes have been going on for years under successive governments. In March 2019, then local government secretary James Brokenshire promised new planning rules so the owners of high street premises can change the way the buildings are used more easily.