Around 11,000 houses unbuild despite planning permission in North Oxfordshire

Around 11,000 homes in north Oxfordshire have planning permission yet remain unbuilt with fears the developers are profiting from leaving land empty.

An officer from Cherwell District Council announced the figure at a scrutiny meeting on Tuesday (November 11).

This comes as the Government ramped up housing targets for councils across the county, meaning Cherwell can longer demonstrate that it has a five-year housing supply.

But homes that have planning permission but have not been built do not contribute towards the housing land supply.

Earlier this year the council said it had 8,000 unbuilt homes with planning permission.

At the meeting, Labour councillor Dr Isabel Creed, who represents Banbury Ruscote, said: “If you continue to have the developers getting planning permission and they don’t build the houses, then we’re going to continue to have this issue of the developers choosing wherever they fancy in Cherwell to build the houses that they want.”

Lib Dem council leader David Hingley, who represents Adderbury, Bloxham and Bodicot, said there were enough permissions to meet the housing land supply, and that the council was “rather reliant on the developers coming forward and building”.

Speaking after the meeting, Lib Dem councillor Chris Brant, representing Cropredy, Sibfords and Wroxton, said: “Instead of giving developers even more powers, the Labour Government should be giving councils like Cherwell the tools to make sure homes that already have planning permission actually get built.

“Local authorities understand their communities and want to see genuinely affordable homes delivered.

“Councils should be empowered to get those homes moving not blamed for delays caused by developers sitting on land.”

Green councillor Ian Middleton, who represents Kidlington East, said: “Whilst infrastructure deficit plays a big part, there’s also a great deal of land banking and speculation being facilitated by the way our current planning system works.

“This puts pressure on planning authorities to approve applications with little control over the delivery process both of housing and vital services, particularly water, sewage, transport and electricity.

“The government’s new planning reforms are likely to make this worse by weakening local democratic control over approvals and reducing Green Belt protection whilst doing nothing to compel developers and landowners to ensure schemes are delivered.

“Coupled with profitability guarantees and viability assessments, it’s little more than a developers’ charter that’s likely to make this situation much worse.

“It will allow landowners to continue to gain planning premiums without any compunction to actually build anything.”

A spokesperson from the Ministry of Housing said: “Developers must get on and build when they have planning permission so we can build the 1.5 million homes people desperately need.

“That’s why we’ve proposed new rules to make housebuilders commit to delivery timeframes, report on annual progress and introduce penalties for those who consistently fail to build quickly enough.

“We will leave no stone unturned to restore the dream of homeownership in Oxfordshire and across the country.”

The Government is exploring giving councils powers to charge developers a ‘Delayed Homes Penalty’ if they do not build homes quickly enough.

Cherwell District Council created a housing delivery action plan earlier this year to help speed up the process of delivering new homes, and it recently gained almost £1m in funding to speed up housing delivering and promote growth.

The district council was contacted for comment.