Image: Craigyhill Housing Estate b y Wilson Adams, CC BY-SA 2.0

Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE), University of Westminster Symposium on Sustainability, Equity and Labour, 10 July 2025

At ProBE’s annual research symposium, the Labour MP Chris Hinchliff presented a comprehensive overview of how the demands of housing, planning and climate change might be met in the future. He began by stressing the importance of reducing carbon emissions from our existing housing stock and pointing to the significant commitments being made by government on the issue, including recently honouring the manifesto pledge to a £13.2 billion warm homes plan to be spent over the next four years on fixing the cold, leaky housing stock, reducing reliance on gas heating and lowering household energy bills by making homes easier to heat and replacing gas boilers and other fossil fuel heating systems. Under the plan, low-income homeowners and renters will receive grants for ‘retrofit’ upgrades such as insulation, solar panels and heat pumps through schemes delivered by energy companies and councils, as well as benefitting from the boiler upgrade scheme, offering £7,500 towards the cost of a heat pump, whilst those living in the least energy efficient homes can get free loft or cavity wall insulation. Councils and housing associations will also receive funding to make upgrades to their properties.

Chris Hinchliff continued by stressing that, in the light of the climate emergency and the housing crisis, there are few topics more important and in greater need of deep thought by politicians and policymakers than the interactions between housing, planning and climate change. As of February 2025, over 1.3m households were on the waiting list for social housing in England and there are over 100,000 children going to sleep every night in temporary accommodation, undeniably a national disgrace. The guiding objective of housing policy must be to ensure that everyone has a secure and genuinely affordable home in which to put down roots and thrive to their fullest potential. But, how do we achieve this? For many years, political discourse has focused on the need to increase the market supply of housing, often with reference to the magic number of 300,000 new builds a year, though academic analysis has found that maintaining this business-as-usual approach would potentially consume England’s entire cumulative 1.5 degrees carbon budget up to 2050 and that this wouldn’t even work to tackle the housing crisis. In 1971 we had roughly one dwelling for every three people in the UK; today there is one for every 2.2 people. Yet since 1971 UK house prices have risen by 3,878 per cent. England has even seen 724,000 more net additional dwellings than new households since 2015, so there is not a lack of total supply to meet housing need but rather a lack of the right kind of homes – namely social and council housing. Only this housing, with rent tied to local incomes and offered well below market rates, will bring down housing waiting lists.

Chris illustrated this with an example from his constituency of North-East Hertfordshire. In the ten years from 2014 to 2024 the two planning authorities of North Hertfordshire and East Hertfordshire delivered a significant expansion in housing supply of 3,973 and 7,948 net additional dwellings, respectively. But what happened to local authority housing waitlists over the same period? They rose from 1,612 to 2,449 in North Hertfordshire and from 2,005 to 2,201 in East Hertfordshire. There have been more than enough new homes in the local area to clear housing waiting lists, but the affordable homes needed are simply not delivered by a developer-led, profit-motivated model. It is also notable that over that same time frame, as austerity hit local authorities, not a single council house was built in the area. Even though major improvements could be made with low-carbon building materials, a housing policy based on a developer-led mass expansion of house building will inevitably have significant climate implications both through land-use change and the use of concrete and other carbon intensive materials. Every time we transform areas of greenfield into developed sites, the associated soil sealing further reduces one of the key carbon sinks; from 2010 to 2022 we lost over 14,000 hectares of our best quality agricultural land to development – high quality soils that otherwise could have been managed to capture and store significant quantities of carbon. This is not to say that we must not build on greenfield sites, but there are significant environmental impacts associated with doing so – even under a system of biodiversity net gain. And the interaction of the flawed market supply analysis with our largely developer-led planning system creates further environmental issues.

Chris then turned to the planning system, pointing out that the argument that we aren’t increasing the supply of market housing fast enough has repeatedly led to deregulation of the planning system to accelerate house building. For 20 years our planning system has been ‘liberalised’, which means cutting back on protections for nature and the role of local democracy, but to little practical effect from a housing perspective. There are currently 1.4 million unbuilt planning permissions across the country as the planning system consistently grants more approvals than developers build out because they will only build at market absorption rates that maintain their profitability. In practice what this means for the planning system is that the Conservatives have bequeathed the Labour Government a presumption in favour of almost any development whatsoever rather than one in favour of sustainable development. As soon as a local authority can no longer persuade the Planning Inspectorate of their 5-year land supply, they are open to virtually unstoppable hostile and speculative development applications, also contributing to negative climate outcomes. Time and again large bolt-on estates are created, characterised by what appears to be the maximum use of plastic and asphalt possible, utterly car dependent and sited far from local amenities, almost the opposite of a 15-minute neighbourhood.

Turning to climate change, Chris pointed out that the erosion of local democracy through planning deregulation is also creating deep-seated cynicism amongst the public when it comes to action to protect the environment. The people living in a particular location, with an emotional attachment and a community identity associated with the surrounding landscape, are those most likely to stand up for the nature and biodiversity without which we cannot tackle the climate emergency. Weighting planning decisions ever more heavily against their voices is therefore likely to be detrimental to the environment. But, moreover, asking the public to adjust their own lifestyles for the sake of tackling climate change is rather harder when they can see the green spaces that they know and love being concreted over to build a new estate of half-a-million-pound houses that their children have no hope of affording.

Chris then returned to his original question – what can we do better to meet the twin challenges of the climate emergency and the housing crisis? He sees the answers in reforming the planning system, to break with the developer-led model that has failed us for so long and take a more strategic approach empowering councils to build the genuinely affordable homes needed on the right sites. This is a vision that he sought to set out through his amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill as it made its recent passage through Parliament. The Bill probably received the most attention for its proposals to strip back environmental protections given an already dire situation, as we cannot tackle the climate emergency without restoring nature and reversing the decline in biodiversity, the UK being one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Fragmented habitats, collapsing species populations, polluted rivers and chalk streams, ancient trees felled without scrutiny – the scale of environmental decline is alarming. Research shows that the UK’s natural capital – the environmental resources like soil, water, and woodland that underpin all life and economic activity – fell by a third just between 1990 and 2014.

In 2024 Chris explained how he had stood by a manifesto that pledged to tackle the nature crisis and reverse the damage done to our natural environment under the previous Conservative Government. So, he was concerned that the Bill the Labour Government put forward was criticised as likely to make the nature crisis worse – not better – in near unanimity by nature charities like the Wildlife Trusts, a host of expert voices, the Office for Environmental Protections, eminent academics, ecologists and conservationists. It was opposed by over 30 nature organisations over fears it would give developers a licence to pay cash to trash nature. He had, therefore, tabled a series of amendments to the Bill to set out what a progressive alternative on planning and housebuilding could look like, such as setting higher national standards for the density of new developments because higher density saves land, minimises land use emissions, supports stronger public transport and active travel networks. He also proposed setting a stronger definition of the presumption of sustainable development to reduce damaging urban sprawl and ribbon development. Subsequently, the Government adopted the principles of some of Chris’ key proposals in its own amendments to the legislation, setting firmer requirements for Environmental Delivery Plans to secure measurable improvements in the specific habitats impacted by development.

However, Chris held that other bolder planning reforms could be made. Councils must once again have the power to assemble land based on what communities need, not just what developers aim to profit from. The passive, ‘call for sites’ model, where councils are forced to accept whichever ill-suited projects developers offer up, in whichever area they choose, should be replaced with proactive site identification based on UN sustainable development goals and acquisition through compulsory purchase at current-use value. This would eliminate inflated, speculative ‘hope value’, which funnels public money into the pockets of wealthy landowners and makes delivering affordable homes functionally impossible. These powers would fundamentally reshape housing delivery if coupled with the funding local authorities need. By giving councils the power to pick the right sites for sustainable development – based on happy, healthy communities with access to green spaces – it will be far easier to avoid any trade-offs with nature, or the need to run roughshod over local communities’ concerns. We also need a planning system that prioritises delivery of genuinely affordable homes so one of his first amendments was aimed at ensuring that councils aren’t just set aggregate housing numbers, but also specific targets for the social homes needed to bring waiting lists down. And it’s not just about how much affordable housing gets built, but what we mean by ‘affordable’. Time and again communities watch the countryside next door disappear, while pressure grows on dwindling services and infrastructure; too often the homes that eventually get built are beyond the financial reach of younger local residents, forcing them to move away and ripping the heart out of the area in the process. So, backed by Shelter and Acorn the renter’s rights union, he proposed redefining ‘affordable housing’ to mean social rent, so that rates are tied to average local incomes.

As the Planning and Infrastructure Bill continues its progress through Parliament, Chris intends to keep urging Ministers to take back control of housing delivery from the private sector – that’s how we make sure the homes workers need get build. If we are bold enough to replace that broken model, the planning system can become a powerful force for good, delivering not just houses built as cheaply as possible for maximum profit, but thriving communities where people have secure homes, green space, quality local infrastructure, and a genuine sense of belonging. This is the future that should be championed – rooted in public need, not private profit.

Four days after this presentation, the whip was withdrawn from Chris Hinchliff and he is now an Independent MP.