Everyone deserves to have a place they can call home. Their own front door, their own letterbox. But hundreds of thousands of people in the Netherlands currently do not. In order to build sufficient homes, we have to speed up the entire chain: from the first sketch to the moment someone turns the key in the lock. To address this, the government is today presenting the Action Plan for Accelerated Homebuilding, drawn up by the Ministerial Task Force on Accelerated Homebuilding, containing 50 concrete actions.
The housing shortage is one of the biggest issues of our time. Too many people’s lives are on hold: young people who cannot move out of their parental home, older people who cannot find a suitable home, and nurses and teachers who live far from their place of work. That is unacceptable,
wrote Minister of Housing and Spatial Planning Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan in a letter to the House of Representatives.
Faster: throughout the entire chain
The biggest gains can be achieved in terms of time. The design and permitting process currently takes around eight years. The government will take measures to halve that period by 2030, through digitalisation of the process and using parallel planning instead of consecutive processes. New-build homes with an approved standard design will no longer need a separate technical building permit. And by 2030 half of all new homes will be built offsite in factories: a place to call home, but delivered faster.
Municipalities that do not have enough capacity will receive support. More than 200 FTEs will be created at municipalities and provinces for the permitting procedure, as well as a national pool of expertise on matters ranging from nitrogen emissions to integrated area development, which can be brought in if a project is in danger of stalling.
More and better: complete neighbourhoods
Ten new national large-scale homebuilding locations are being created. The first five were designated in late August, and the other five will follow this autumn when the National Spatial Strategy is adopted. At those locations, we will be building not just homes, but complete neighbourhoods: with healthcare, education, employment, green spaces and accessibility all being taken into account at the earliest stage. In this way we will build communities, with due consideration for the needs of key groups such as older people.
Between now and 2035, the government will set aside €7 billion for delivering affordable homes. Housing associations will be given more scope for investment in homebuilding and for making improvements to existing housing stock. And it will be made more attractive to build homes in the mid-priced rental segment, for people who earn too much for social housing but too little to buy a house. This will be achieved by measures such as updating and clarifying the conditions for foreign pension funds. In addition, the government will earmark €500 million for investment in mid-priced rental homes.
A new scheme will be introduced next year that will encourage municipalities to purchase land themselves for homebuilding, with central government bearing part of the financial risk. Owning the land enables faster building and reduces the risk of sudden cost increases.
Attention to grid congestion and nitrogen emissions
Room on the power grid and nitrogen emissions are issues that continue to require attention. The government wants homebuilding projects to go ahead even in areas where there is grid congestion, and it will make agreements on this with grid operators and developers. As regards nitrogen emissions, the government is working with provincial authorities to put measures in place that will help restore nature and gradually restart the permitting process.
We won’t do this alone
The government will implement the plan together with the parties that will ensure the homes are actually built: builders, developers, investors, housing associations, municipalities and provinces. All of these parties will attend the renewed National Homebuilding Acceleration Roundtable, where bottlenecks in specific projects can be dealt with immediately to avoid delays. If a project stalls nonetheless, central government can scale up efforts and break the deadlock.
Minister Boekholt-O’Sullivan: I’ll keep going with what works well, and innovate where changes are needed. It’s clear what needs to be done, the money is available and there are plenty of homebuilding plans. What counts now is speeding up the process: from sketching the design to laying the foundations. Central government can’t do this alone; we will be working with the builders, the investors, the municipalities and the provinces. Let’s get to work, for a home for everyone.