Housing Secretary Michael Gove is to make it easier to convert retail outlets, betting shops and takeaway premises into residential dwellings.

The plan, he says, is to make better use of buildings by increasing the availability of residential property, especially in inner city areas. Current homeowners, meanwhile, will find it easier to build an extension or loft conversation after Gove lightens planning laws. 

A spokesman for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said they were confident that by relaxing the commercial to residential conversion rules, they would help rejuvenate high streets and encourage people to come and live in cities.

“We must build more [housing] in the places that make sense – in our inner cities so that we protect our countryside,” said Gove.

“And we must make better use of the buildings we already have – empty shops or offices cannot be gathering dust while we have an urgent need for more homes.”

Gove insists government in line to meet ‘advisory’ target

Gove’s speech on reforming national permitted development rights, came at a time when a parliamentary cross-party group warned the government was about to fall short of its annual target to build 300,000 new homes each year. The government’s response was to alter the target to an advisory one. 

At their manifesto in 2019, the government promised to build “a million homes by the next vote.’ Gove still insists this is possible, despite a Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities saying the opposite.

In another bid to ‘get building’, Gove also intends to spend £24mn creating a “super-squad” of planners etc to make sure plans for major housing developments face no ‘local’ obstacles. This includes being able to ‘streamline and simplify’ planning consent matters. The first location he’ll be focusing on, he insists, is Cambridgeshire.

Major housing developers warn more reform needed

But major house developers weren’t impressed. In fact, Steve Turner, executive director of the Home Builders Federation, was clear that if Gove didn’t do more to free up red tape in the planning process then “housing supply could halve” in the coming years.

Neither were housing charities. A spokesman for Shelter said converting retail units into residential homes could result in ‘shoddy housing’ ie where the quality was poor and the buildings themselves “unsafe.”

Polly Neate, chief executive, said: “We need proper investment to build much-needed genuinely affordable homes, not more piecemeal reform.”

Meanwhile, if elected, Labour’s plan to deal with the housing crisis is to free up poorer areas of the greenbelt for developers to start building on. Housing developers and other interested parties have already written to Gove, urging him to use abandoned brownfield sites. They say this could lead to the space for a further 1.6m homes to be built in the UK and at least make inroads into the crisis.

Get in touch 

Keep up to date with property market news by subscribing to a free trial of Blue Bricks magazine here today. You can cancel after the trial and it costs nothing, or it’s just £9.99 if you like it and want to continue (which we’re sure you will).