Devolution & The Birmingham Shortfall 4

August. I always look forward to August. The summer holidays. The start of the football season. Perhaps a test match or two. For the last few years though my favourite part of August has been my annual review of the progress that is being made towards distributing Birmingham’s long-term housing shortfall across it’s housing market area (HMA) partners.

 

2015’s blog is here.

 

2016’s blog is here.

 

2017’s blog here.

 

It is now 18 months since the Birmingham Development Plan was adopted and so the deadline (such that it is) for the distribution of the shortfall is now only another 18 months away (which in strategic land terms is the equivalent of Peter Kay’s taxi just turning your corner now). Surely this is the year when substantive progress can be reported?

 

Alas not.

 

There was a flurry of excitement in February when GL Hearn’s Strategic Growth Study (SGS) finally emerged in February. This time last year I wrote that a glass half-full kind of person would see the agreement across the 14 HMA LPAs to actually commission the SGS as a positive step forward and a platform for discussions about the capacity for development in each. A glass half-empty kind of person, I wrote, would see anything other than a definitive piece of work published punctually and with the public endorsement of 14 Council leaders as being a can with Green Belt written on it being kicked a bit further down the road.

 

As it turned out, it was the pessimists that were proved right because it is unlikely that the desk-based document will form part of many local plan evidence bases (though GL Hearn, in fairness, probably did what they could with the brief, time and budget that they were given) and any hopes of political ‘buy-in’ were dashed in the second paragraph of the ‘position statement’ that accompanied the publication of the report. ‘This is not a policy statement’ it read as the people who should have been taking ownership of it sought instead to distance themselves from it.

 

In response to the SGS Bromsgrove’s Council (a key HMA partner, but not a part of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA)) considered a motion in April proposing that the Council “will temporarily set aside the broad brush basic report of Hearn until such time as its own in depth comprehensive review of the Green Belt has been completed. Only then will the content and conclusions of the Hearn report be considered alongside our own detailed investigation into the Green Belt.” The motion fell, but during the debate “Councillor Denaro confirmed that since he had taken up the position as Leader he had held no discussions with Birmingham in respect of housing”, which is really quite remarkable.

 

On the WMCA front Andy Street has his feet firmly under the mayoral desk and announced a £350m Housing Deal in March, with a focus on priority brownfield sites and a shift in delivery from 10,000 homes a year to 16,000. The Housing Deal commits to 215,000 homes between 2019 and 2031, which sounds really, really ambitious, but is actually little more than Government’s standard calculation of housing need for the constituent and non-constituent WMCA members, which itself is little more than the requirements in current (often out-of-date local plans) with some provision to address historic backlogs.

 

The agreement with Government states that by December 2019 ‘local plans within constituent and non-constituent authorities will be updated as necessary to deliver and accommodate 215,000 homes by 2030/31’, but they will not need to be. Local plans need to be updated to deal with the Birmingham and (now the) Black Country shortfalls, but the WMCA’s Spatial Investment & Delivery Plan (SIDP) will very definitely not be looking ahead. The Draft SIDP states that:

 

Authorities are working together through well established and effective “duty to co-operate” arrangements which address the complex geography outlined and include those authorities that are not members of the WMCA.  These arrangements have not yet resolved all the spatial issues for local plans, in particular the distribution of unmet housing needs in Birmingham and the Black Country and this SIDP does not seek to circumvent the established and proper channels for doing this.

 

Well established and effective ‘duty to co-operate arrangements’? That would make even C+C Music Factory go ‘hmm’ (shout out to anybody else celebrating their 40^th birthday this year).

 

Whilst a mythical ‘statement of common ground’ is awaited local plan progress across the West Midlands resembles something of a Mexican standoff with each LPA that could make a significant shortfall contribution knowing that it will have to make a move at some point, but also knowing that whatever contribution it made could be deemed to be either too high (as far as local members at the next elections are concerned) or too low (as far as a planning inspector at the next HMA EiP is concerned).

 

Lichfield, for example, (also not a member of the WMCA, but also a key component of the HMA) has consulted on the issues and options that it’s local plan review should consider, but it’s stated desire for a preferred option early next year appears unlikely.

 

A Solihull Local Development Scheme (LDS) published in January 2018 suggested that a Submission Draft Plan might emerge in summer/autumn 2018, but it appears more likely that the SGS will prompt a move backwards rather than forwards.

 

Bromsgrove also published a LDS in January 2018 that suggested that it’s ‘Issues & Options’ consultation would start in March, but it has still not emerged. The Council will no doubt be keen to make sure that it fully takes into account the SGS and the new NPPF.

 

I optimistically speculated previously that the devolution agenda might provide the leverage for cities and city-regions to grapple with cross-border challenges in a faster, multi-lateral way, rather than on a bilateral, local plan by local plan basis. The housing package, the step-change in delivery, the unlocking of long-since stalled sites and the expression of all of this in a region-wide SIDP are all entirely laudable endeavours. It is telling though that a key priority of these short-term wins is to ‘relieve pressure on the Green Belt’ because for as long this is the case there will be no solution to the long-term, shortfall issues and, therefore, no prospect of up-to-date local plans.

 

I need a holiday.