What you see on the catwalk isn’t usually what ends up on the clothes racks. So it is with think-tank reports: despite its author Jack Airey having now been appointed as Number 10’s housing and planning special adviser, don’t assume that the recommendations in the Policy Exchange’s January 2020 report Rethinking the Planning System for the 21st Century are going to form government policy in their current eye-catching form. But they are certainly going to be hugely influential – and Policy Exchange is certainly this government’s ideas factory.
The proposals
The report’s two main recommendations are as follows:
- “Local planning authorities should no longer systematically control what specific activity can take place on individual land plots, nor should they attempt to calculate how much space is ‘needed’ by local households and firms and set policy accordingly. A looser binary zonal system should be introduced instead. This would allow obsolete land uses to be recycled much more quickly and local planning authorities would no longer micro-manage land markets.”
- “Rather than produce extensive local planning documents, local planning authorities should produce a definitive and limited set of rules detailing what type and form of development is not acceptable in their urban area.” The rules would be binding, with no flexibility.
The big idea is that: “Land should be zoned either as development land, where there is a presumption in favour of new development, or non-development land, where there is not a presumption and minor development is only possible in more restricted circumstances. Land zoned as development land will include existing urban areas and urban extensions made possible by improved infrastructure.”
Development control would simply become a check as to whether proposals conform to the local plan’s rules. Elected councillors’ input would be limited to setting the rules rather than in subsequent decision-making, which in part “could be machine-based subject to human review”.
The thrust of the recommendations is not new – after all, the Housing and Planning Act 2016 introduced “permission in principle” for land on brownfield land registers (a largely unused failure); the whole permitted development regime has sought to reduce planning requirements for a range of operations and uses to a tick-box regulatory process (with particular elements, such as office to residential, leading to controversy); there has been long-standing encouragement for greater use of officers’ delegated powers.
What’s the problem?
The recommendations are simplistic, enticingly so, with no real acknowledgement of the challenges inherent in an inflexible binary zonal system, for instance:
- The report accepts specific controls would apply in relation to national parks, areas of natural beauty, listed buildings and conservation areas – and that plans would need to “separate certain harmful uses that have a negative impact on neighbours”. Would this system be as simple as suggested? Would it be overly rigid?
- How would local planning authorities be discouraged from retaining excessive control by way of their zoning rules and design prescriptions? In fact, despite Airey’s – and Policy Exchange’s – support for the separate recommendations of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, the initiatives pull in opposite directions. And plan-making can already be extremely contentious and politicised – if the plan is all that matters, how much more will everyone fight over every nuance?
- The current, albeit flawed, planning system’s role is in guiding developers, owners, communities and infrastructure providers as to where and how much development is likely to happen within the plan period. Developers’ land purchasing is influenced by what development is likely to come forward around a site. Even post-Brexit, cumulative environmental effects need to be assessed. Town centre development is dependent on strict policing of the sequential test. Upfront decisions to guide infrastructure and utility provision: leaving the market to decide whether sites are developed as housing or for any other purposes, and to what scale, helps nobody.
- As with any significant policy change, managing the transition won’t be easy. Some will rush to secure permission ahead of a potentially adverse zoning decision, others will delay investment decisions until the new system is implemented.
There is a fundamental misconception in the report. It points to the 2012 consolidation of “200 documents and 7,000 pages of national planning policy” into the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), without acknowledging that much of that material is now within the government’s increasingly amorphous Planning Practice Guidance and suggests that, in the same way: “Rather than stretching to many hundreds of pages (as local plans currently do), local plans should be short, including a zonal map and several pages of development control rules.” But the policies in most local plans do only take up several pages – the rest is supporting explanatory text, precisely as with the NPPF and its subsidiary guidance.
An alternative way forward
Rapid improvements to our plan-making and decision-taking systems could be made without disruptive legislative change, and without what I would term a deliberately “anti-planning in the interests of the free market” approach, by learning from Bridget Rosewell. She was a member of the advisory panel to the Policy Exchange report – although the report notes that members “may not necessarily agree with every analysis and recommendation made”. Her 2019 review of the planning appeal process, with focused and practical proposals for changes to processes and targets, has already halved the average planning inquiry timescale.
There have been many failed reviews of the planning system, a number since the Conservative Party postulated that it was “broken” in its 2010 manifesto documents. I would venture to suggest that – however attractive this latest set of ideas looks for those frustrated with current planning outcomes – whether you are a developer, owner, investor or concerned citizen, the “clean break” recommended by Policy Exchange is no answer.
Will the government’s Planning White Paper this month introduce a practical new spring wardrobe – or the emperor’s new clothes?
Simon Ricketts is a partner at Town Legal LLP
