The British Government is planning to introduce mandatory design regulations for new homes, both for sale and to rent, with minimum sizes for rooms and storage spaces, the Prime Minister has announced.
Developers will also be banned from filling show homes with ‘deceptively small furniture’, a trick used to make rooms look bigger, Theresa May told the Chartered Institute of Housing’s national conference.
‘I cannot defend a system in which owners and tenants are forced to accept tiny homes with inadequate storage. Where developers feel the need to fill show homes with deceptively small furniture, and where the lack of universal standards encourages a race to the bottom,’ she said.
At present, not all local authorities insist on the ‘nationally described space standard’, which sets out the minimum sizes for single and double bedrooms in new homes and the minimum floor-to-ceiling height, and call for built-in storage, as well as areas for equipment such as a hot water cylinder, boiler or heat exchanger, being used as a condition of granting planning permission. May said at the conference that the ad-hoc application of these guidelines is not acceptable.
She outlined that a lot is being done to help more homes to be built, including the Government’s £5.5 billion housing infrastructure fund and local authorities have been given greater freedom to grant planning permission on brownfield sites.
‘This is a Government with a bold vision for housing and a willingness to act on it. A government that has delivered radical reforms for today, and the permanent structural changes that will continue to benefit the country for decades to come,’ May said.
‘The housing shortage in this country began not because of a blip lasting one year or one Parliament, but because not enough homes were built over many decades. The very worst thing we could do would be to make the same mistake again,’ she added.
May also set out the next steps on the Social Housing Green Paper, which was published last year. An action plan is expected in September, calling for more high quality social housing, better tenant rights, and demanding that landlords demonstrate how they have acted on any concerns raised.
But the National Federation of Builders said that the changes being proposed are too little, too late. ‘Time after time the Prime Minister and her housing ministers were told that their policy decisions were actively encouraging the construction of smaller homes, but they ignored every warning,’ said Richard Beresford, NFB chief executive.
He pointed out that local authorities who did not mandate space standards within local planning must take their share of the blame, but he explained that the Government knew this was happening and did not take the right steps to solve it.
Rico Wojtulewicz, head of housing and planning policy at the House Builders Association, said he has raised the issue of rabbit hutch homes with the Government and local authorities many times.
