No more Planning for the Future

The end, when it came, was fitting for two reasons.

Firstly, it was that The Telegraph that had been notified of a ‘private meeting’ in which Michael Gove had told some MPs that he would not be pursuing a standalone planning bill. It was The Telegraph, of course, that launched the ‘Hands Off Our Land’ campaign in 2011 calling for the Coalition “to look again at proposed changes to planning laws which risk undermining the safeguards that have protected the countryside for almost 70 years.”

Secondly, is was typical of the quality of debate around the ‘Planning for the Future’ White Paper that it’s demise was reported as being the death knell for “a controversial new planning law which would have allowed uncontrolled building in parts of the country”.

Yes this round of planning reform is dead. It is not resting. It is not stunned. It has passed on. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet it’s maker. In a mere eighteen months we have gone from ‘tearing it down and starting again’ to some ‘sensible tidying up measures’ being added instead to a Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill.

This, I would humbly submit, is regrettable. Whilst governments, secretaries of state, ministers, white papers and Telegraph campaigns come and go there did seem to be an opportunity at the start of this parliament to do something substantive. A reformist government had been elected with a healthy majority and the housing crisis seemed fairly high up on the electorate’s list of priorities.

Time will tell as to what the volte-face should be attributed to and, whilst the Chesham & Amersham by-election is an obvious low-water mark, two underlying contributory factors come to mind.

Firstly, it seemed to me that the attitude of the collective profession went from enthusiastic curiosity at the start of the consultation period to jaded scepticism by the end of it. It is interesting to look back now at the appearances of Chris Katkowski (proponent) on ‘Have I Got Planning News For You’ in the August of 2020 and Lord Carnworth (opponent) in the October.

The Carnworth view, that “the aim should be to build on the strengths of the existing system, reduce the clutter, and ensure adequate resources, in terms of finance and personnel; and above all to provide a period of policy stability to allow the reformed system to be settle down and gain public understanding and confidence” was the one that prevailed.

It is better the devil you know perhaps.

Or perhaps the profession took an attack on it’s system as an attack on planners generally, thus making an objective assessment of the White Paper that bit harder. The present system though is plainly not working. Local plan after local plan are collapsing in the south of England; the tilted balance allows appeal after appeal to be upheld; and planning officer after planning officer thinks ‘sod this for a game of soldiers’.

When asked if the system could be made to work if it was simply better resourced, Katkowski said “you cannot be serious! Are you joking?”
 
The second contributory factor could be the nakedly cyncial ‘developer’s charter’ narrative that was not only allowed to emerge and take hold, but was never pushed back against. It also seemed to me, and obviously details needed to be fleshed out, that the White Paper would support the principle of plan-led development and would raise the bar for establishing the principle of development on sites out with a local plan. That is how I would have spun it.

A ‘Growth Area’ could have been the equivalent of a current allocation, but with a wishy washy list of policy aspirations replaced by detailed design codes. A ‘Renewal Area’ could have been anywhere where redevelopment would be supported, again supplemented by codes of a complexity commensurate to the circumstances. The trading estate on it’s last legs, for example; or guidance on where clusters of tall buildings might be appropriate; or those rows of terraces around a tram or tube stop suitable for ‘gentle densification’. A ‘Protection Area’ could have been absolutely everywhere else, subjecting, conceivably, every green field to the same ‘very special circumstances’ test that currently applies only to Green Belt.

The ‘developer’s charter’ confection was allowed to include the claim that in relation to ‘Growth Areas’ communities would have ‘no right to say what is built in them’, which, regardless of how the White Paper proposals might have played out, is manifestly nonsense. Democratic involvement is simply moved upstream to a single point at which the principle of development is established, which is where it belongs.

Let us compare that imagined scenario to the extension of the status quo. Local plans do not progress (and often collapse) because of three main factors: Green Belt, housing numbers and cross-boundary issues. There are no proposals in the Levelling Up White Paper to address these issues and they require more than a sensible tidying up measures. Where local plans are out of date, or where a LPA cannot demonstrate a five year supply of deliverable housing, or where a LPA has failed the Housing Delivery Test, planning applications are assessed against a presumption in favour of sustainable of development. I have just today read that “Worthing’s decision to reject plans for 475 homes on a site that it wants to designate as a "green gap" in its emerging local plan has been overturned by a planning inspector on appeal, after he found a "considerable" housing land supply shortfall”. What do we suppose that that decision will do for public understanding of and confidence in the planning system in Worthing?

I am dwelling, of course (and pun intended), on planning for housing, as is my want, but it is clear that housing is sucking all of the life out of the system to the detriment of everything else that a plan-led system should be contributing to.

I go back to the question that I put to my guests in Episode 26 of the 50 Shades of Planning Podcast, which covered the newly-arrived White Paper. If you were designing a planning system from scratch would it look more like that imagined by the White Paper or that with which we try to work presently? The answer is surely the former. Whether we got there in one go or in five goes is now a moot point obviously, but it seems valid to ask those in the ‘better the devil you know’ camp whether more progress would have been made by being a bit more open to fleshing out these ideas rather than now having to rely on a magic money fairy paying our council offices a visit.

When the next white paper is published and the Telegraph launches it’s next ‘Save Our Countryside’ campaign we will be able to look back on everything that happens, or does not happen, between then and now and contemplate what might have been.