There’s an episode of The
Simpsons in which, having been inspired by a Spinal Tap gig, Homer and Marge
buy Bart an electric guitar. A little while later, spotting that his initial
enthusiasm has waned, Homer asks Bart why he doesn’t play it anymore…
“I'll tell you the truth”, says
Bart. “I wasn't good at it so I quit. I hope you're not mad.”
“Son, come here”, says Homer
laughing. “Of course I'm not mad. If something's hard to do, then it's not
worth doing.”
There
is a reason, Reader, for shoehorning a Simpsons reference into the start of
this piece, and that is because this exchange often comes to mind upon hearing news
of local plan delay. Why is it that according to NLP, in March this year, more
than ten years since the 2004 Planning & Compulsory Purchase Act, 46% of
councils had no local plan in place or had adopted one before the NPPF was
introduced in 2012? The short answer is that local plans are hard. They are
hard technically (the empirical tests of soundness), but more importantly they
are hard politically.
Imagine
the scene. The newly-appointed leader of a shire authority calls the Head of
Planning into their office.
“Right then. We need a local plan in
place. What can we do about it?”
“Well, Councillor, as I said to your
predecessor, we know that we need to release Green Belt and we know where Green
Belt release needs to take place. We can finish the draft plan now, consult on
it over the summer, submit it in the autumn, and have it examined next spring.”
“Ok. We could have next year’s local
election campaigns dominated by ‘Save Our Green Belt” campaigns, or...?”
“Well. Big City Council is having it’s
plan examined in the autumn and we might have to accommodate some of it’s need
as well. Plus the household projections will be out in the winter and the
recessionary trends may bring our requirement down, so to submit a plan that
completely up-to-date we could wait for that and update open space and retail
studies in meantime.”
“Splendid. Let’s do that…”
How
then to break this cycle of prevarication in the post-RSS world. It is
difficult to recall the previous Government deploying any carrots to incentivise
LPAs to get plans in place, but the NPPF’s presumption in favour of sustainable
development, to apply when development plans were absent or out-of-date, was
meant (after the transitional period) as a pretty big stick. NLP described local plan progress since the NPPF as “marginal” so the new Government has unveiled an even bigger stick, which is the prospect of
the Government stepping in to get plans in place (“in consultation with local
people”) if authorities have not done so by ‘early 2017’. This commitment was
made in the Fixing The Foundations document produced by the Treasury in July
2015.
So
what will happen when the immovable object of a recalcitrant LPA meets the deadline imposed by the irresistible force of a new Government in ‘jobs
and growth’ mode?
The
early review.
The compromise, says the pragmatist. The fudge, says the cynic.
According
to the Local Government Association’s Planning Advisory Service (PAS), since
the NPPF was introduced around a third of the plans that have been found sound
have included the early review and it is clear that this is the direction that
authorities will be encouraged to take in order to avoid the Government
stepping in.
Greg
Clark’s letter to the Planning Inspectorate’s chief executive on 21 July 2015 highlighted
the “real value in getting a local plan in place at the soonest opportunity,
even if it has some shortcomings which are not critical to the whole plan."
This
was followed a day later by Brandon Lewis’ ministerial statement emphasising
PPG’s reference to early review as an "appropriate way of ensuring that a
local plan is not unnecessarily delayed by seeking to resolve matters which are
not critical to the plan’s soundness or legal competence as a whole”.
How are shortcomings going to be defined as non-critical, and what are non-critical matters doing in the plan in the first place? Even if something could be descriebd as non-critical, how is an early review reconciled with the NPPF
requirement for LPAs to positively seek opportunities to
meet the development needs of their area and to take account of longer term
requirements, "preferably a 15-year time horizon"? The pragmatist would say that any plan is better than no plan,
and it is hard to argue with that, but where is the benefit to anyone, least of all the general
public, in having to revisit the big decisions every few years? The NPPF states in relation to Green Belt, for example, that when it is being defined LPAs should satisfy themselves that boundaries will not need to be altered at the end of the development plan period. “We’ve saved
our Green Belt!” states the headlines in the local paper. Well, actually…
For the Inspector presented with an early review as
the pragmatic solution to cross-boundary issues and local plan timetables that
just haven’t aligned, it might very well be justified. The solution to this
problem is a return to sub-regional planning, but there is nothing to suggest a
statutory return to that any time soon.
For the Inspector though that is presented with an
early review as an opportunity to delay the big decision, the early review
really should not be justified.
“We accept, Inspector, that
the OAN has been shown to be low, but we be propose to review matters after a Green
Belt to be undertaken with our neighbours…”
“We accept, Inspector, that
our delivery rates might be high, and that our strategic sites may not deliver
in their entirety within the plan period, but we would propose to review
matters when the five year supply position dips below five years…”
The height of the soundness bar is different for every plan, but it will
be possible to distinguish the former justification from the latter. PAS
guidance on early reviews highlights that they are “not a panacea for addressing the difficult issues”, but as 2017 approaches one can imagine that
the pressure on PINS to accept a broader definition of ‘non-critical’ than
might currently be the case will increase.
This
might be politically expedient, but if one accepts that one of the reasons for
forward planning is the identification and solving of future problems then early
reviews do not represent good planning.
So either local planning is made easier, both technically (and Brandon Lewis has formed an 8
strong panel of experts to examine how the production of plans can be
simplified), or politically (by
de-politicising the big decisions through a return to regional planning), or recalcitrant
leaders of recalcitrant authorities can be convinced, like learning the guitar,
that the harder something is to do, the more it’s worth doing.
Hmm.
Long
live the fudge…
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