Sam Stafford's Blog

In a fantastic example of joined-up, cross-department government thinking, the Farrell Review, an independent review of architecture and the built environment, will report today, barely three weeks after the publication of national planning policy guidance (NPPG). Sir Terry Farrell was commissioned by Culture and Creative Industries Minister Ed Vaizey in March 2013 with the intention of 'helping the Department for Culture, Media and Sport develop its thinking about the role for Government in the achievement of high quality design to better influence and shape policy across government'. In terms of influencing planning policy though that horse has probably bolted. The NPPG, in the spirit of the NPPF consolidates the 100 pages of guidance in 'By Design: Urban Design in the Planning System' (2000) and 'Better Places to Live By Design' (2001) with 18 pages, emphasises what good design is and why it is important, but provides little by way of practical e...

It is apposite that on the day the BBC is covering a poll from Populus that reveals the segments of the British electorate, the CPRE has published a report on the impact, two years on, of the NPPF entitled 'Community Control or Countryside Chaos'. It is apposite because one of Populus' six segments of the electorate is 'comfortable nostalgia ' who ' tend to be older, more traditional voters who dislike the social and cultural changes they see as altering Britain for the worse'. Apparently 20% of Conservative voters in 2010 fell in to this category and one could legitimately speculate that many also subscribe to the CPRE, National Trust and Daily Telegraph. To illustrate the point the Telegraph 's coverage of the CPRE report alerts readers to 'traditional English village life' being 'under threat because of plans for 700,000 new homes in the countryside'. Let's put aside though the thought that if the countryside was not...

If a Garden City or two is to form part of the solution to the country's housing crisis then it would appear that a future Government of the current hue (and given Labour's embrace in opposition of 'localism', any hue) will not be yielding any influence on bringing them to bare. The Telegraph reported in January that 'a secret Whitehall report recommending that two new cities are built in southern England to combat the housing shortage is being suppressed by David Cameron', but a FOI response issued by DCLG states that it 'holds no such report' (another Government department might though of course...). Attention is instead directed to an answer by Housing Minister Kris Hopkins to a Parliamentary Question, which outlines 'the work of the department on supporting locally-led development'. Specifically, the answer states that 'my department has absolutely no plans to impose new towns on any part of the country'. This lang...

Bare with me, but inspired by a recent trip to Diggerland, it occurred to me that the latest round of consultation from DCLG might best be described as a metaphor in which the planning system is a JCB operated by Eric Pickles. Close your eyes and enjoy picturing the scene. Mr Pickles is trying to manoeuvre the system in a way that 'ensures further progress on decision making and housing delivery'. He has in his hands two levers: one for the development industry, a carrot, and, one for local government, a stick. The carrot i n this consultation is a proposal to 'aid the delivery of small scale housing sites' by introducing a 10-unit and 1,000 m² gross floor space threshold for affordable housing contributions through section 106 planning obligations. The stick is a proposal to increase the threshold for designating LPAs as under-performing, based on the speed of deciding applications for major development, from 30% to 40% or fewer of decisions made on tim...

Statistics this week that may or may not be related.... The Conservative Home website features the results of a survey last week that asked Conservative members to prioritise various policies ahead of the budget. Perhaps unsurprisingly, on a scale of 1 to 10 the allocation of more land for building scored 5.12 and is firmly in the 'low priority' category. In other news, Local Plan coverage remains poor. Nick Boles confirms here that still only three quarters of LPAs have published a Local Plan and only 'over half' have adopted one. A reminder that whilst planners prepare a plan, it's the politicians that adopt it.