If you have 45 minutes to spare, go to the Leintwardine village website and watch the video. You’ll see some very well-briefed locals persuade a room full of councillors to reject a 45-home housing development.
You can watch as, stage by dramatic stage, members of Herefordshire council’s planning committee unpick the plans by LWD Developments, arguing it is not sustainable development. The conclusion is a vote against by 14 votes to nil, despite an officer recommendation to approve the plan, and despite Herefordshire council acknowledging it had no assured five-year housing land supply. It is, in its way, gripping viewing and the appeal, if and when it comes, will make an unmissable sequel (see https://leintwardine.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/5423/).
The Leintwardine decision is the latest very small sign of a politically driven change to the meaning of sustainable development – and it is causing some confusion. Three years after it became the centrepiece of Coalition planning policy, is anyone any clearer about what sustainable development means?
Since March 2012 sustainable development has been enshrined in the National Planning Policy Framework. In the next few days the government is expected to publish a review of the NPPF’s first three years of life. It will come as a response to a thoughtful recent select committee report.
Whatever the communities secretary Eric Pickles says – and he is expected to say that the NPPF was meant to be flexible, and is flexing well – the Coalition’s planning agenda will be put to a much bigger test in just under three months’ time. Local elections on 7 May will be dominated by fiercely fought planning battles. The fall-out – which could mean many councillors losing their seats – will be felt by whichever party or parties form the next government after the same day’s general election.
Meanwhile, a series of high court and appeal court judgments have made it harder to interpret the NPPF, and harder for local councils to prove their sustainable development plans are based on objective evidence.
The court of appeal’s judgement of Gedling BC v Timmins, handed down in January, is the latest complicating blow. It raises questions, but does not fully answer them, on what development is allowed in the green belt.
Richard Kimblin, barrister at No 5 Chambers, who acted for Gedling council, says: “The NPPF was announced as a simplification but, once you analyse it, it is as complicated as it ever was. The courts are requiring objective evidence of policy need, which wasn’t required before. The court in the Gedling case is inviting the government to revise the NPPF.”
Some in the planning and property world are beginning to wonder if “sustainable development” will make it to its fourth birthday. Sceptics say that is because too many council planners and government inspectors have allowed economic considerations to act like a trump card. The social and environmental aspects of sustainability have been overlooked, say doubters.
The smart money says that whoever forms the next government will toughen up their interpretation – and that claiming new jobs or economic benefits will no longer be enough to ensure a controversial planning application is waved through.
“It’s clear the government meant sustainable development to have economic, social and environmental dimensions, and that they are mutually dependent. You should look across all three to make a decision. And that has to be right,” says Gary Halman, managing partner at Manchester-based HOW Planning.
He adds: “But the criticism is that in practise over the past few years more emphasis has been put on economic issues at the expense of the others. Of course it is up to the decision maker. They are entitled to take that view.”
However, Halman senses that local councillors, planning inspectors and ministers are beginning to revise their views.
“We are starting to detect a swing of the pendulum in some decisions, away from economic considerations and towards social and economic, which is perhaps not unrelated to the forthcoming general election. We’re seeing ministers accord higher weight to environmental and especially heritage in their planning decisions, after a few years in which inspectors have pretty consistently over-ruled councils. There’s a harder
line on environmental issues, so there is some evidence that a rebalancing of what sustainable development means is going on.”
A change in the rules last year gives government ministers much greater scope to call in planning applications. Meanwhile, local councillors are showing a determination to turn down applications even when they might have been expected to say yes, such as in the Leintwardine example.
The fact that so few local councils have approved core strategies that conform to the NPPF is exacerbating the problem. Without an approved core strategy the NPPF becomes the main guide to what counts as sustainable development. Without a local plan the local context is missing (see box).
Peter Tooher, director at Nexus Planning, suggests that the brevity and vagueness of the NPPF – and the difficulty of completing a core strategy – has invited this kind of problem. “Today planning is more of a political issue than it has been in the past 20 years,” he says.
“The NPPF was right to go for a plan-led system, but where the problem has arisen is that it’s difficult and complicated for local councils to prepare their plans, often because they have not got to grips with what their actual housing requirements are.
“The NPPF requires a robust analysis of the objectivity of their evidence for development, which makes it much clearer where the difficult choices have to be made. It’s come to the crunch,” he says, hinting that some kind of show-down over development was inevitable however the NPPF defined sustainable development.
Kevin Hunt, director at JLL in Bristol, has no problem with the definition, but worries that “sustainable development” is used as code for a sometimes narrow list of concerns. Too often, he says, concerns about transport dominate thinking.
“Sustainable development must be looked at in the round. To be deliverable, sustainability needs to be more than ‘a box-ticking exercise’ and it certainly shouldn’t focus on any one single narrow measure of sustainability. For example, many people get hung up on sustainability it terms of transport,” he says.
Colin Morrison, Birmingham-based head of sustainability at planning consultant Turley, suggests the answer may come from Scotland. A new government may allow the definition of sustainable development to mutate, he says.
“We may see an evolution of sustainable development, we may see the balance change in how it is defined, and the NPPF allows for that freedom of interpretation,” he says, pointing to Scotland’s new National Planning Framework.
The Scottish definition, if adopted in England, would meet many of the political objections because it does not allow economic considerations to act as a trump card. During consultations the Scottish government reduced the weight to be given by planners to economic considerations from “significant” to merely “due” weight.
“Look at Scotland, where their new NPF has unpacked what sustainable development means. It’s much broader, and it could be a model for how the English definition could evolve,” says Morrison.
The general election is now 82 days away. In the wake of what could be a bruising political debate about planning, a new government, or an old government with a new mandate, will have to decide what sustainable development means. And it might not mean what it used to.
The simple answer
“The purpose of planning is to help achieve sustainable development. Sustainable means ensuring that better lives for ourselves don’t mean worse lives for future generations.
Development means growth.”
These are the opening words of the 2012 National Planning Policy Framework.
The Scottish answer
The Scottish government says sustainable development involves 12 principles that amount collectively to a definition. They are “due weight” to economic benefit; a response to the economic context; efficient use of resources; support for housing and business; climate change; protecting cultural and natural heritage; sustainable waste management and land use; avoiding over-development; and improving health and well-being.
You can find the document at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2014/06/3539
