Clare Fielding and Steve Quartermain round up the legislation, consultations and government announcements that continue to reshape our planning system.
“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.“ So said prime minister Winston Churchill in October 1943, as the House of Commons debated the rebuilding of the Commons Chamber, following its destruction by incendiary bombs during the Blitz. Churchill approved of the House’s decision to retain the rectangular pattern of the chamber, rather than changing to a semi-circular design, believing that the more adversarial layout helped define the two-party system, which he viewed as the essence of British democracy.
How apt that Michael Gove reached for Churchill’s words when launching the government’s long-term plan for housing on 24 July. Because if you are looking for an exemplar of the adversarial party politics Churchill was referring to in those words, repurposed now by Gove, you could do worse than the English planning system. Reforming the planning system is something that politicians of all persuasions love to do. Why is this so?
There are a number of reasons.
The lure of planning
One is simply because they can. In increasingly straitened times, governments have less money to play with and their ability to pull big levers to switch on growth is costly and limited by what the markets will live with. Micro, supply-side policy levers like planning are easy and comparatively inexpensive to pull. And the potential benefits of getting it right are great indeed.
Imagine a world in which we were building as many homes as we need, where developers could know that a scheme that achieved policy objectives would be swiftly consented without political interference, or where planning departments were properly resourced.
The trouble is that politicians quite often get it wrong. Where there are politicians, there is politics, and planning is one of those areas where politics looms large. This can be in the form of rarefied ideology or in the baser form of electoral cut and thrust.
Localism is one example of the former. What could be more Conservative (slash Liberal Democrat) in ideological terms than to push planning down to the local level, scrapping regional government offices, spatial plans and housing targets? What could have been more Labour than to have erected all that top-down machinery in the first place? Opposing political philosophies are at play, and neither solved our housing problem.
Call-ins are a classic case of the latter. Despite the criteria for governing the process, Gove’s decisions on the coal mine at Whitehaven in Cumbria and the Marks & Spencer Oxford Street proposals illustrate the interplay between the politics and planning merits.
This political push-me-pull-you has not served us well. It is a collective failure. It ought to be possible to create a planning system that consistently defines predictable outcomes and delivers rational decisions – both essential to attracting investment and driving growth. Planning should lead the way in showing how the public and private sectors can effectively partner together to achieve objectives we all agree on, like levelling up and reacting to climate change.
Where are we now?
Against that background, what is the current state of play with the government’s planning reforms? There are lots of pieces on the board.
■ Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill
This did not quite make it out of the Lords at the end of the last parliamentary session. It will come back to the House of Commons in the autumn and should be on the statute book at some point before Christmas – hopefully quicker than that.
■ National Planning Policy Framework
The government consulted on amendments to the NPPF – response awaited.
■ Infrastructure levy consultation
Again, response awaited. Certainly, from the conversations we have each had in the sector, at roundtables and elsewhere, the message to the government is to drop this aspect of the reform agenda, and instead look to amend the community infrastructure levy regime.
■ Planning fees
This is now all but a done deal. The increase in planning fees has been taken forward. New draft regulations were published for consultation in July, but notably missing is the ability to pay local planning authorities for enhanced levels of service. Many in the development industry will be disappointed at this missed opportunity.
Any other business?
Various new elements were launched by Gove on 24 July: announcements about investment priorities; a consultation on more changes to permitted development rights; a consultation on implementation of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill’s plan-making reforms; a consultation on reform of the nationally significant infrastructure projects process; and updates to planning policy guidance.
As outlined by Gove in his speech, the government’s priority is unblocking the planning system to unleash building on underused sites in high-demand regions. He announced a new £24m Planning Skills Delivery Fund to scale up local planning capacity and the creation of a new “super squad” of leading planners charged with unblocking major housing developments (with £13.5m in financial support). Some of this is to be paid for out of an increase in planning fees and the abolition of the “free go” for applications amended after refusal. The first mission for the super squad is in Cambridge, before they are parachuted behind the lines in other locations.
Gove also nodded to forthcoming changes to the NPPF which are due to be published later this year – presumably alongside royal assent for the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill. Expect the NPPF to say that development should proceed on adopted sites unless there is a strong presumption against; councils should be open and pragmatic in agreeing changes to developments where conditions mean that the original proposals may no longer be viable; and a more permissive planning regime should apply to brownfield land. Do not expect any change to green belt policy.
We are also to see the launch of the Office for Place, a new body with Nicholas Boys Smith as its interim chair. It is tasked with leading a “design revolution”, supporting residents to “demand what they find beautiful” from developers.
There is also a focus on building safety. Second staircases are mandated in new residential buildings above 18m, subject to transitional arrangements. The Cladding Safety Scheme will be open to all eligible buildings. New design codes are to be rolled out for new-build homes and the government will consult on a universal Future Homes Standard “to deliver comfortable homes built to be zero carbon”.
The government is consulting on changes to the plan-making system, to be introduced in autumn 2024. A key priority is to simplify and streamline local plans. A local plan is expected to comprise a single document with a clearly specified purpose and a strengthened role for the strategic vision to be developed in collaboration with communities and stakeholders.
A set of proposed national development management policies sitting outside the plan are being prepared to avoid unnecessary repetition. This consultation also picks up on proposals to remove the requirement for plans to be “justified” from the soundness test – this being key to the government’s proposal that evidence in plan preparation should be more proportionate.
Plan preparation timeframes would be shorter – 30 months – although it also signals that work needs to be done before the clock starts. Time will tell if this really achieves a quicker plan-making process.
Back to the future?
Ministers seem to think that the planning system needs to settle down – just after they have had their turn at reform as part of a process that has played out over the past 15 years.
Planning by its nature is a long-term game and some previous changes were scarcely given the chance to develop before being swept away by the next wave of thinking.
In considering reforms, the policy advisers could be brave enough to reconsider some of the “old” stuff that actually was working pretty well. But for now we ride the current wave. If only it was going a little bit faster.
Clare Fielding is managing partner and Steve Quartermain is a consultant at Town Legal
