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This article is provided courtesy of the news feed at http://www.newstartmag.co.uk/news

Europe’s more proactive and responsive approaches to land development and planning could help England’s ‘increasingly acute’ housing affordability problem, according to a new national report.

The findings of a review by the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU) reveal the country is trailing European counterparts, and says it is possible to build more homes and have less volatile house prices than is currently the case in England.

The Review of European Planning Systems highlights how local authorities in the Netherlands, Germany and France have the most proactive approach in delivering land available for development to the market.

The report also outlines how all of the countries’ planning systems studied had a more responsive approach to changing housing demand than England, with the exception of the Netherlands.

The review for the NHPAU, the government’s advisory body on housing affordability, was led by De Montfort University, Leicester and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and commissioned to improve understanding of the role of planning systems in helping or constraining housing production in other EU countries.

Recent measures to speed up the planning process in France and Germany were identified, along with a relaxation of planning controls in Spain, introduced in response to housing demand.

While cautioning against simply ‘transplanting’ aspects of other planning systems, NHPAU chief executive Neil McDonald said the report included ‘lessons to learn’ and described it as ‘a useful contribution to the debate about how our planning system might evolve.’

‘We need more homes if we are to tackle our increasingly acute housing affordability problem,’ he said. ‘The report shows that it is possible to build at much faster rates than we currently achieve and to have lower and more stable house prices.’