The State of Planning

"When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather."

Samuel Johnson, 1758.

“When two English property professionals meet, their first talk is the state of the planning system.”

Samuel Stafford, 2022.

I cannot remember a time during my working life when property professionals were not grumbling about the planning system, but things do feel especially bad at the minute. The 2018 Raynsford Review, commissioned by the Town & Country Planning Association, asserted that the system is at it’s lowest ebb.

“Planning in England is less effective than at any time in the post-war era, with an underfunded and deeply demoralised public planning service, conflicting policy objectives, and significant deregulation”, the report stated.

If things were bad in 2018 they are arguably worse now.

Catriona Riddell wrote in Planning Magazine in November 2021 about low morale in LPAs, citing the increasingly divisive nature of development, the expectation that planning departments can do much more with much less, and the breaking down of relationships between officers and members.

Not long afterwards a half year report from Redrow stated that “it is clear the planning system is now at its lowest point for a number of years", citing planning issues as a factor behind the fall in its number of completions. The report also stated that resourcing issues within LPAs and the impacts of losing staff to the private sector are being compounded by the bureaucratic and unacceptably slow system.

Looking across the warning lights on the planning system dashboard, there are fair few that are flashing, which, taken together, speak to a system beset by under-funding, over-politicisation, and operational dysfunction.

This IFS graphic from last year shows the percentage change in departmental ‘core’ (non-virus) resource budgets between 2009/10 and 2021/22.

The public sector has obviously faced significant funding challenges over the last twelve years, but if planning is a mirror that reflects back a society’s priorities then this portrays the esteem in which the system, and perhaps by extension the profession, is being held.

A 2019 analysis by the IFS revealed that gross spend on planning and development was reduced by 42% per person between 2009/10 and 2019/20. Net spend reduced by 59%, which was the largest reduction across all areas of local government.

The RTPI has calculated that net expenditure by LPAs fell by 43%, from £844m in 2009/10 to £480m in 2020/21. This amounts to just 0.45% of local government budgets allocated to planning services.

50 Shades of Planning, the country’s number one-ranked, town planning-based podcast, covered the local authority staffing crisis in an episode published in January this year. A 'Call for Evidence' was launched in advance inviting people across the profession to share their anonymised thoughts on what life is really like on planning’s front line. The twenty-one submissions that were received, the majority from development management officers, have been reproduced in full and unedited on the 50 Shades of Planning Blog and they are well worth a read.

Joey Gardiner described the blog in Planning Magazine as a “veritable howl of despair”. “It portrays a system on the edge”, wrote Joey, “manned by staff crushed by overwork and pandemic isolation, and suffering regular abuse from the public and even members”. “It’s really demoralising and morale is at an all-time low,” wrote one officer. “The last 24 months have been miserable”, wrote another. “The lack of leadership and competent management is a real issue, and it makes the rest of the team underneath feel depressed”, added a third.

“Anything that anyone might see as a luxury has been under pressure,” Paul Seddon of Nottingham City Council told Planning magazine. “Unless it’s statutory, or it brings in income, or if you don’t do it then the consequence is intervention, then it is being cut back,” he said.

Stretched funds and low numbers of staff are major contributing factor to delays in the system.

The RTPI has explored the performance of LPAs in England by examining the number of applications received and the number of decisions made in the agreed timeframe between 2009 and 2021. Whilst the number of applications has consistently remained between 400,000 and 500,000 per year the number of decisions made in the agreed timescales is declining. In 2009, approximately 85% of decisions were made within statutory time limits and without performance agreements, but by 2021 this figure had fallen to 49%. Whilst Covid will have had a recent impact, the trend over the last twelve years is both clear and concerning.

Most significantly for the housebuilding sector, the number of major residential planning approvals granted has fallen to its lowest level for a decade. Quarterly DLUHC statistics published recently show that just 1,009 major residential decisions – those for 10 homes or more – were approved in the April to June quarter of 2022, which is the lowest figure since the third quarter of 2012.

At the end of last year the speed of decision-making dropped to its lowest level for five years.

Planning policy is faring little better. The sixteen local plans adopted last year was the lowest since the NPPF was adopted ten years ago and this year the local plan system is grinding to halt.

Lichfields reported in April on the then trickle of local plans that had been withdrawn, ‘shelved’, stalled, or simply not taking on the feedback of local plan inspectors, since around the turn of the year. These 11 plans, in Basildon, Dacorum, Hertsmere, Mid Sussex, St Albans, Dorset, Ashfield, Sheffield, Arun, Welwyn Hatfield and Castle Point, contain between them, according to Lichfields, allocations for 70,000 homes, planning applications for which will not now be progressing. The above, according to Lichfields, is the combined socio-economic cost of that delay, but numbers can distract from the simple fact that these are homes that families are not yet able to move into to. By September, that trickle had become a torrent, with Havant, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, East Hampshire, Epping Forest, Medway, Slough, Stockport, Thanet, Three Rivers, Wealden, added to that list at that point.

A few weeks on the list also includes Swale, Dudley, Bromsgrove, Basingstoke & Deane, Uttlesford, Hinckley & Bosworth, Thurrock and North Somerset.

Planning Magazine recently reported that the number of local plans published, submitted for examination and adopted this year could be the lowest in over a decade if plan-making continues at its current rate, according to data recently published by the Planning Inspectorate.

These are the just the LPAs with a public position. Many, many others are simply biding their time, but if there is any sense at all that ‘top down’ targets will be jettisoned as part of whatever he next few weeks bring then the torrent will become a flood and local plan-making could effectively ground to a complete halt.

Arguably, the Leaders of Councils like Ashfield, are acting entirely rationally. The plan-led system presently includes few carrots to incentivise LPAs to progress them and no threat of a stick if they do not. That is perhaps an inevitable consequence of local plans taking on a burden in many policy areas that should be carried at a much higher level of governance. Green Belts are, by and large, city-wide propositions being dealt with on a district-by-district basis. Housing requirements are, by and large, a function of housing market areas being, again, dealt with often on a district-by-district basis. Further, the is no spatial dimension presently, for example, to national infrastructure or energy commitments. All this is being dealt within a construct that places cross boundary planning on to all intents and purposes a voluntary footing.

When it comes to operational dysfunction within the planning system, both centrally and locally, nothing is more emblematic than the issue of nutrient pollution and the need for development to achieve nutrient neutrality.

The ‘Dutch N’ decision in the European Court of Justice in 2018 probably passed most people by at the time, but attention was certainly grabbed in 2019 when Natural England unilaterally advised the Solent authorities that they should apply a 'precautionary principle' to all new development involving overnight stays (e.g. housing and hotels) so as to ensure ‘nitrate neutrality’. It has been estimated that between 7,200 and 12,000 homes are currently delayed in the Solent area as a result.

The neutrality issue, pertaining to both nitrates and phosphates, rapidly spread. In March 2022 Natural England announced that an additional 20 catchments, covering 42 additional local authorities were newly subject to the restriction, bringing the total to 27 catchments covering parts or all of 74 local authorities. The HBF has calculated that at least 100,000 homes are currently delayed.

The housebuilding sector, and SME builders for whom this issue is particularly damaging, has several legitimate grievances about the emergence and management of the neutrality issue.

Firstly, the volume of nutrients contributed by new residential development is dwarfed by the volumes generated from other sources. The Somerset local authorities calculated in 2021 that phosphorus generated from urban sources (4%), of which new housebuilding is only a sub-set, is marginal when compared to the phosphates generated through farming (42%) and wastewater treatment works (52%).

Secondly, the housebuilding sector has paid in the region of £3 billion in Infrastructure Charges to the water industry since 1991. This is a levy designed to ensure that water services are kept up-to-date with the needs of the plan-led system, which, patently, has not been the case.

Thirdly, it is to be noted that no restrictions have been placed on existing, let alone new, farming activities since the Dutch N decision.

Fourthly, progress towards calculating and then achieving nutrient neutrality has been slow and uncoordinated.

After two years of the HBF and the industry advising Government that nature-based solutions alone could not resolve the problem, and following a series of embarrassing revelations about the extent of sewerage release into rivers by water companies, the last Government finally announced in July a programme for upgrading of wastewater treatment works, but even now DLHUC, DEFRA and OFWAT appear to have their own interpretations as to how this can be achieved.

What hope for the immediate future?

The Levelling Up & Regeneration Bill, which is more likely to progress now that Michael Gove is back at DLUHC, is something of a Curate’s Egg in that, as largely enabling legislation, it contains some hooks on which could be hung the kind of radical reform mooted by 2020’s ‘Planning for the Future’ White Paper. At present though, and perhaps deliberately to smooth it’s parliamentary passage, the detail that has emerged and the narrative around it amount merely to sensible ‘tidying up’ measures.

A proposed increase in planning fees will help to build capacity, but this increase on its own will not be enough to comprehensively address the issue of resourcing.

Similarly, there is some scepticism as to whether Strategic Development Strategies (SDS) for which there is provision in the LURB will address the funk currently afflicting local plan-making. SDSs would only be undertaken voluntarily by LPAs, but not in areas where there is already a Combined Authority or a Mayoral Combined Authority and only if a higher tier, County-level authority is involved. SDSs would not allocate sites, would only be reviewed ‘from time to time’, as opposed to the five year obligation on local plans, and, unlike joint local plans, cannot be willed into existence by a Secretary of State. Is that clear? It is legitimate to ask of whether these arrangements will make it more or less likely that places like Welwyn will adopt a local plan in anything shorter than the long term.

Investment Zones (IZs), announcement as part of Kwarsi Kwartang’s’ ‘Growth Plan’ on 23 September, are now apparently "under review", but this episode reveals a lot about the current state of planning.

Firstly, IZs were to be chosen following a “rapid expression of interest process” conducted with mayoral combined authorities and upper tier local authorities, which, for the most part, have no planning powers themselves and will not be directly responsible for the local consent that has or may yet be conferred by way of planning permission. The fact that, for example, Oxfordshire County Council announced that it did not want to be involved in the initiative, but that Oxford City Council, in response, immediately announced that it did, does not portray a robust, resilient framework for good public policy and planning outcomes.

Secondly, a narrative quickly emerged that conflated the “disapplying of legacy EU red tape” with ‘an attack on nature’. It seems highly unlikely that any planner with an application or local plan stalled because of nutrient neutrality would object to the principle of streamlining environmental regulations, or indeed adopting a more place-based rather than silo-based multi-agency consenting regime (indeed if such an approach can apply to IZs surely it can apply anywhere). It is not so long ago that most involved in the planning sector broadly welcomed a move from the current Environment Impact Assessment regime to a more outcomes-based one. There was nothing to suggest a fundamental departure from that broad direction of travel and nothing in the Growth Plan to undermine it.

The fact that planning has become a playing field on which sectoral interest groups seek to score their own points at the expense of the health and integrity of the wider system is regrettable, as is the immediate lack of ownership of the Growth Plan, such that these potentially fatal narratives were able to flicker persistently without anybody snuffing them out.

Thirdly, the additional information published on 24 September also stated that “the government will look to introduce primary legislation in order to enable the offer on tax and simplified regulations”. Whilst noting that clarity about much of the Government’s intention is required, this does perhaps speak to a reformist infatuation with new primary legislation at the expense of understanding the dusty old tools already in the planning system’s box. Here, for example, one thinks of Local Development Orders, Simplified Planning Zones or planning freedom schemes, legislative provision for which already exists.

Linked to this point is where the aspiration for Investment Zones came from. As with much of planning policy of late it would appear to emanate from the minds of think tank policy wonks rather than pragmatic practitioners with more of a feel for the nuts and bolts. To a degree it was ever thus, but Investment Zones were the answer to a question, given operational pressures elsewhere, that nobody in the development industry is asking. Is planning itself really the obstacle to delivering the priority sites and wider regeneration areas that have been mooted for such status? Where there is the political will, and a functioning local authority planning department, there is usually a way already.

The Growth Plan though perpetuated a narrative that planning and planners are a problem for housing delivery rather than the solution.

Strong, healthy, vibrant planning departments are necessary for the timely approval of meaningful, impactful, quality planning applications. Lee Rowley was quoted at the Conservative Party Conference as saying that he would ‘look into’ LPA resources and address it ‘as and when’.

Further, there has to be recognition of the role of national and local housing targets, as well greater-than-local planning, in addressing the current obstacles to getting local plans adopted. Obfuscation nationally begets obfuscation locally. Arguably the single most significant supply side measure the Secretary of State could adopt would be to plainly and simply commit to an ambitious national target and state unequivocally that LPAs and PINs should plan positively to deliver it.

There is a clear and present danger that thinking about planning only in terms of a particularly controversial individual application or a particularly controversial individual local plan allocation diverts focus from the much bigger picture.

In his excoriation of the Growth Plan Martin Wolf wrote in the FT of the need for pro-growth regional policy and for the state to supply ‘first-class public goods in the understanding that these are a social benefit and not a cost’. Planning, it could be argued, is the ultimate public good. An enabling, creative force for good.

In 2019, the RTPI published a report called ‘Invest and Prosper’, which made a positive case for investment in planning based upon it’s contribution to wider society and the economy. The report concluded that:

• Affordable housing delivered through planning obligations saved the NHS £240 million in 2019;
• Providing sufficient affordable housing could save UK households over £5bn per year;
• Living in a well-planned neighbourhood can support up to 59% of NHS-recommended weekly activity;
• Urban greenspaces in Great Britain provide £16.5 billion in environmental, health and amenity value per year;
• Planning ensures good access to economic opportunities, with 73% of permissions for housing in England located within 10km of a major employment cluster;
• Homes developed through planning permission are three times more likely to meet National Space Standards; and
• Energy savings in climate-friendly developments could save 19 million tonnes of CO2 (£234m-£1.3bn) per year.

It is to that bigger picture, regardless of legislative framework, Secretary of State, or name of the relevant Government department, that planners’ eyes need to remain focused.

Is planning at its lowest ebb? Who is to say. It may or may not be the case that the system and indeed the standing of the profession generally is due an upswing in fortunes. It may or may not be the case that there are as yet undiscovered depths still to plumb. It will definitely be the case though that property professionals will be grumbling about it for the rest of my working life.

As Heraclitus, said that "the only constant in life is change." Planning is the art of managing it.