In our work to save special places, the RSPB has a lot of experience in dealing with proposals for new housing, so any announcement on future housing plans is worth a close look.
Ed Miliband's speech at the Labour Party conference yesterday included some important announcements about housing. He pledged that by 2020, 200,000 new homes would be built each year (that will be just in England, as housing is a matter for the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). It sounds a lot, and it is compared with recent building rates - fewer than 110,000 were completed in the 12 months to June 2013. However, recent estimates put the need at around 240-245,000 a year now, and back in the 1960s we built well over 300,000 homes a year. Seen in that context, although it's a challenging target, it's not such a big number.
The RSPB is less concerned about how many homes there are as where they are, and the standard they are built to.
Where they are might include within towns, cities and villages; it might include extending those towns, cities and villages, or it might include entirely new settlements, including Garden Cities as promised by Ed Miliband (and indeed, by current planning policy). It's likely to include a combination of all those things. But what's important to us is avoiding areas of wildlife value, whether it's on brownfield or greenfield sites.
Then there's the regional dimension. More than 60% of housing need is concentrated in London and the south of England. These are also regions under environmental stress and are likely to be most affected by climate change. Local responsibility for housing delivery is important, but there's no way at the moment of having a sensible national conversation about where housing should go. We need a spatial national planning framework for England, and the institutional means for bringing it about.
Finally, how do we build our homes? We need to continue the drive to make all new homes zero-carbon by 2016, as well as to make them water-efficient. We can do this through stringent building regulations. But we also need to design biodiversity into new homes and communities through the planning system. This could be through new urban green spaces, rich in wildlife, at every scale from major parks down to swift boxes built into the fabric of individual homes. That way, nature can have a home alongside people.
There are some good examples of designing for biodiversity in our recent publication, Planning Naturally, and for more technical guidance, see Designing for biodiversity by the Royal Institute of British Architects (but I’m afraid you’ll have to pay for that).
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