How the upcoming election could transform housing and energy policies

The starting gun has been fired, the weeks and months of speculation are over, the General Election will be on July 4th. If the polling is to be believed then we’re going to see a change of Government in the second half of the year; but what does this mean for housing and energy policies, and for the development sector more generally. 

Housing

At UKREiiF,  Angela Rayner MP, Labour’s Deputy Leader and Shadow Housing Secretary, took the stage to give the opening keynote address. Her speech, which is available here, laid out a vision for a future that involves the building of new homes in a new generation of new towns, and the provision of services and amenities within these new places that meet the needs of communities. 

Rayner set out a ‘New Towns Code’, establishing criteria that developers must meet in these new settlements:

• More social and affordable homes – with a gold standard aim of 40 per cent
• Buildings with character, in tree-lined streets that fit in with nearby areas
• Design that pays attention to local history and identity
• Planning fit for the future, with good links to town and city centres
• Guaranteed public transport and public services, from doctors’ surgeries to schools
• And access to nature, parks, and places for children to play.

While we as an industry prepare for the brave new world that may be coming later this year, LandInsight and Give My View are both valuable tools to supercharge your projects. 

LandInsight provides data on financial comparables, to allow you to assess the financial and viability impact of the social and affordable housing requirement. It also provides information on the location of listed buildings and conservation areas to allow you to accommodate and respond to local history and identity. Our new amenities layer allows you to see what local services are currently provided in an area and support the expansion of these services to respond to new developments; and our BNG layer allows you to appreciate the implications of the Environment Act requirement for at least 10% net gain in biodiversity.  

Our community consultation platform, Give My View, allows you to target underrepresented groups within the community  to facilitate a conversation with the wider population regarding how the area will change - and avoid a lengthy engagement from a small minority of motivated objectors. 

Renewable energy

We recently attended a breakfast round table with Dr Alan Whitehead MP.  Dr. Whitehead is the member of parliament for Southampton, Test and Shadow Minister for Energy Security.  

Dr Whitehead, who has been an MP since 1997, and has had responsibility for this current portfolio since 2016, demonstrated a clear understanding of the intricacies and inter-relationships that must be managed if Net Zero is to remain an achievable goal. He outlined that Net Zero would  continue to be a key pledge for an incoming government, should Labour be elected. 

It was clear from Dr Whitehead’s presentation that, should the Government change, there will be a big focus on renewable energy and grid capacity and resilience. This could mean a lot more support for power development and the renewable energy sector. 

Within LandInsight you can access substation information from DNOs, including their RAG status, allowing you to quickly identify where there is capacity and where there may be bottlenecks in the infrastructure. 

Give My View has been assisting the renewable energy sector across various projects, including for RWE, Vattenfall, and Statera. Across seven of the renewable energy focused projects that we’ve been involved in; 18,500 community members have shared their views on our GMV platform. Through these projects,  86,000 preferences, priorities, concerns & ideas have been shared by community members, and through digital forms of marketing, we have been able to direct 78,000 community members through to GMV, and reached a total of 1.6 million people. 

If you would like to talk to us about how LandInsight or Give My View can help you deliver more clean, renewable energy please get in touch for a demo of LandInsight, or a demo of Give My View.