Steph Culpin stands up in the stuffy room in Bristol’s City Hall to say her piece. “Myself and another 54 leaseholders are living in an unsafe building, and it’s at risk of a fire spreading… It’s terrifying to know we’re living like this, but also having a freeholder that is ignoring our requests to get this fixed.
“We shouldn’t let these companies continue building until they honour their responsibilities to the residents of Orchard House,” she continues.
Steph is addressing a planning appeal hearing, back in September 2024. The owners of her block in Brislington, who have refused to comply with a legal order to make the building fire-safe, are seeking permission to build 58 more flats on top of the car park.
This passionate plea cannot legally influence the planning application. But soon afterwards, council planning officers are taking aim at the actions of the developers, accusing them of using underhand tactics to get out of building much-needed affordable housing.
The first part of their tactic is to gain permission to build a care home. Then, they submit a further application for residential development – and argue that including affordable housing is not financially viable, because this would mean making less profit compared with the site’s ‘alternative use’ as a care home.
Months later, the developer’s appeal is thrown out by the government’s Planning Inspectorate, which rules on contentious applications. But the story doesn’t stop there.
We shouldn’t let these companies continue building until they honour their responsibilities
Steph Culpin, Orchard House resident
The Cable has uncovered a number of other cases around Bristol where the same group has done the same thing, raising questions about a murky system of planning ‘viability assessments’. All this in a city – with 22,000 households on the social housing waiting list and 1,600 living in temporary accommodation – where affordable housing is in ever-greater need.
Attempts to avoid affordable housing
Brothers Sam and Ranbir Litt are prolific property Bristol developers. They have been granted permission to build student accommodation on Wade Street in St Jude’s, are seeking to redevelop the old funeral home on Church Road, where there were two fires in 2023, and have various other applications and appeals pending with Bristol City Council. They have previously been convicted of fire safety breaches and have faced criticism for their developments.
At the appeal hearing for the application to build a new block of flats next to Orchard House, council planners accused the developers of getting permission for a care home with no intention of building one, to avoid the council’s affordable housing targets of 30%.
This appears to be a consistent strategy.
In November 2022, planning permission was granted for a 76-bed care home on a brownfield site off Whitchurch Lane. Developer Horizon Homes resubmitted an application in August 2024 to build 61 flats there, arguing that the land value if developed into a care home meant building any affordable housing would inevitably be less profitable. This application is still pending consideration, but Horizon’s website lists the development as ‘coming soon’.
Affordable homes completions in Bristol
- 2018/19 – 220
- 2019/20 – 304
- 2020/21 – 400
- 2021/22 – 474
- 2022/23 – 309
- 2023/24 – 607
- 2024/25 – 593 (Projected at the end of Q2)
In 2021 another company, Treetops Bristol Limited, received outline permission from Bath and North East Somerset (BaNES) Council to redevelop a closed-down care home. In 2023, an application to build 36 flats was submitted – and later updated arguing that the only financially viable option would be 0% affordable housing. This was criticised by Keynsham town councillors and described as illogical by BaNES’ viability consultants. The application is still to be decided.
And in August 2024, Brent Knoll Land Ltd submitted a planning application for a 110-bed care home near Cribbs Causeway. This followed an unsuccessful 2022 application for a 20-home residential development – which strangely still features on the ‘coming soon’ part of Brent Knoll’s website.
Each planning application was submitted under a different company name. All, though, are controlled by Sam or Ranbir Litt.
Playing the viability game
Developers have long used viability assessments to get around commitments to build affordable homes, by showing that this would be too unprofitable. A decade ago, they could do so safe in the knowledge that documents containing their calculations would be hidden from public view.
But in 2016, Bristol City Council committed to publishing them, following a Cable campaign and the example set by Islington, Greenwich and Lambeth councils. In 2018, national planning guidance was updated to say the assessments should be publicly available.
Simon Hill, a Bristol-based housing researcher, has worked on viability assessments for both private developers and local authorities. “It is a bit of a dark art, and you’re selecting cases that fit your argument,” he says. “When I was doing it, it often felt like the council was on the back foot, partly because the developers were throwing as much money as needed towards it to avoid affordable housing.”
Hill says developers’ ability to defend profit margins of 15-20% as reasonable has remained strong. “You’d never see it go to 12% or 10%… I’ve always thought the lack of flexibility is pretty wild,” he continues, adding that with building costs now much higher, it may be even easier for developers to advance their arguments and browbeat councils.
One recent example is in Peckham, where a developer slashed a major project’s affordable housing levels from 35% (270 homes) to 12% (77).
Late in 2024, the government indicated plans to tighten guidance on assessing viability, to protect councils from having to settle for lower amounts of affordable housing. But can Bristol do anything in the meantime?
How can Bristol maximise affordable housing?
Bristol has the ambitious target, including through its council-owned housing company Goram Homes, of building 1,000 affordable homes annually, because the city needs more than 20,000 over 20 years to meet need.
The city’s Local Plan says viability considerations should not be a limiting factor on the level of affordable housing sought via developers – with a target of 35% in developments of 10 or more homes.
But if developers can offer at least 20% affordable housing, their applications are fast-tracked, and they don’t need to produce viability assessments. This so-called ‘threshold’ approach, which has applied in and around the city centre since 2018, is designed to be more attractive to developers, as long as they start building within 18 months.
A similar approach has been successful in the capital since its introduction in 2017, according to the Centre For London, leading to a rise in the proportion of affordable housing per scheme referred to the mayor from 25% in 2011 to 37% in 2022. In Bristol, the threshold approach has been applied at several sites, most recently the city-centre redevelopments of the Premier Inn and Rupert Street Car Park. But the council says viability challenges now mean developers are likelier to make traditional viability arguments, offering less than 20% affordable housing.
Salford Council, meanwhile, has used a ‘clawback mechanism’ stipulating that schemes’ viability be assessed more than once, by in-house valuation teams. When land values rise during the construction and marketing process, it can impose extra financial demands on developers, rather than them simply being able to cream off the extra cash.
“A developer can claim lots of things in their viability assessment – and if they manage to sell the houses for more, then the council could get some of that value back after the point of sale because the viability assessment was wrong,” Simon Hill says of this approach.
Bristol City Council said that it has used ‘viability review clauses’ in its Section 106 agreements for many years which can generate income for provision of additional affordable housing, either on-site or in the form of an off-site financial contribution.
‘Developers looking to game the system’
On the Orchard House case, Barry Parsons, chair of Bristol’s housing committee, says: “This was an attempt to manipulate and game the system, by using a calculation for the land value that wasn’t appropriate, so we were pleased the Planning Inspectorate agreed with us.”
Parsons, a Green councillor for Easton, adds that Osprey Court looks a “very similar” case. “They seem to be using the same tactics to try and get developments through with no affordable housing,” he says. “Officers have [told] the applicant they consider the land value should be much lower than the applicant has claimed.
“There are developers out there looking to game the system, and we’re determined not to let them,” he says, adding that Bristol typically gets on average about 10 claims a year that developers can’t deliver the required amount of affordable housing.
The Cable approached Horizon Homes for comment, but did not receive a response. And in February, Horizon Homes submitted another application to build nine flats next to Orchard House, including balconies and a roof terrace, which isn’t subject to affordable housing targets because it’s less than 10 units.
“Viability is genuinely more challenging at the moment,” Parsons says, pointing to post-Grenfell safety regulations, cost inflation in the construction industry outstripping sales values in Bristol, and a shortage of construction workers.
Parsons says the council can distinguish between genuine viability challenges and underhand tactics thanks to in-house viability consultants, and rigorous scrutiny through planning committees, which he says is more likely to reflect policy rather than party politics under the new committee system.
“There are challenges in getting schemes to a point where they can be delivered anyway,” adds Parsons. “We’re not seeing the high-density city-centre development we want.
In January, it was revealed there were about 16,000 homes with planning permission waiting to be built – 2,000 more than last year. Council leader Tony Dyer admitted he had failed in his attempts to unblock these schemes.
“It’s part of my job too to talk to owners of sites that have been blocked and get them moving again,” Parsons says. “It’s challenging [but] it’s a huge number of homes, so if it can be made to work, it’s probably one of the less onerous ways of getting homes delivered, especially affordable.”
He says the council is proactively consulting with developers, so that expectations around affordable housing are clear before applications go in, and the design of the schemes is attractive to housing associations who will take on the social rent homes.
Parsons adds that the number of appeals in cases where the council took too long to decide on a planning application has fallen, since Bristol’s planning department was placed under special measures by the government earlier this year. As of September, there seems to have been some improvement.
In 2023/24, there were 607 affordable homes overall completed in Bristol, compared with 309 the previous year. By the end of September 2024, there had been 176 completions. The council forecasts that it will build 593 affordable homes, including 136 homes for social rent – the cheapest type for tenants – in 2024/25.
“These figures are higher than for well over 20 years, still shy of the 800 affordable the previous mayor [Marvin Rees] was angling for,” Parsons says. “Given the extra constraints at the moment, it’s unlikely we’ll achieve that this year or next.”
Looking ahead, Parsons says the volume of affordable housing, especially social rent, will depend on a government announcement in April, following Labour’s flagship target of building 1.5m new homes overall in the next five years.
Also crucial, he claims, is the ability of the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) to get local councils to work together across boundaries. “We’ve always said we need to collaborate with our neighbours, which isn’t something frankly historically that the Combined Authority has been particularly willing to engage with us on. We’re looking to see change there.”
A thousand affordable homes a year remains a “long-term aspiration”, admits Parsons. “We’re not there yet.”
With real viability issues in the construction industry, and the council facing an uphill battle to get affordable homes built, it’s more important than ever for Bristol that private developers play fair.
