I was in Manchester recently and took the opportunity to catch up with old friend of the podcast Charlotte Leach and new friends of the podcast Andrew Johnston and Lisa Tye.
Over the course of an hour so we chatted about a few of the hot topics exercising the planning profession at minute. We talked about ‘the next phase of planning reform’ as set out in a written ministerial statement issued by the Secretary of State last month. That takes in the “unleashing” of development around rail stations; a requirement upon local authorities to notify the Secretary of State where they intend to refuse an application for 150 or more homes; and streamlining statutory consultees.
We talked about AI and it’s growing influence on the planning system, and we talked about Section 106 Agreements.
We also talked about national development management policies (NDMPs), which is a topic that has featured regularly on the podcast this year and has become something of a touchstone for both the boldness Government’s reform agenda and, if planning is a mirror that reflects back a society’s priorities, our attitudes towards new development.
This is what the Housing & Planning Minister told me (pardon the humblebrag…) at the LPDF Policy Conference recently.
“Ultimately, and I think for a very good reason, and on the basis of legal advice I can’t share, we took the view that we should go non-statutory in the first instance, primarily to minimise the disruption and delay to the plan- and decision-making systems that we assessed a statutory change would bring. We think that going via the non-statutory route through essentially tidying up and a revision to the NPPF will achieve the same outcomes. I don’t think we would have taken the statutory route if we were clear that we couldn’t have achieved broadly the same outcomes.”
We are where we are and whilst it seems to me that lots of people within the profession (including me) would have opted for statutory NDMPs, the people that matter have taken a different philosophical view. I say philosophical because presumably if somebody had wanted to pursue a statutory route then they would have sought a second legal opinion (perhaps from Chris Katkowski, for example).
Let us accept the need to move on though and focus on the outcomes to which Minister refers and against which the judiciousness of the decision to pursue non-statutory NDMPs will ultimately be judged.
Fundamentally, what are NDMPs for?
Outwith, still for the most part, local plans, are they to establish the principle of development in sensible locations such as land around railway stations? Will a non-statutory NDMP “unleash” such development? Will it be, if not a ‘default yes’, then so strong a presumption as to convince the owner of a partially-let trading estate to run down all of the remaining leases and invest half a million pounds in a planning application? Will it convince the promoters of a new settlement proposition around a station in the Green Belt that is 25 minutes from the centre of a major station to not wait another five years for a draft allocation and to go all in now?
Will a non-statutory NDMP encourage more land to come forward for development?
If non-statutory NDMPs do encourage more land to come forward will non-statutory NDMPs support the swifter determination of planning applications because, according to Lichfields for the LPDF, major outlines took eight months in 2014 and two years in 2024. If when the presumption in favour of sustainable is applied will out of date local plan policies be immediately and automatically switched off such that applications can be readily determined in accordance with the new NDMPs?
Will non-statutory NDMPs contribute towards shorter local plan preparation process as part of the brave new world announced by the Minister at the afore-mentioned LPDF Policy Conference (pardon a second humblebrag…). Will the new NPPF remove all hesitation, repetition, and deviation.
If non-statutory NDMPs do not do these things (and these represent my main professional interests - other planners in other sectors will have other priorities) then what is the point given the very genuine possibility that in muddier the waters they might actually make things worse.
As Andrew said at the end of episode 154 we operate in a discretionary system and we must like it that way mustn’t we because here is an opportunity to swap some of that discretion for some certainty and it looks as if that opportunity might not be fully grasped.
Relatedly, I was challenged after the LPDF Policy Conference as to why the agenda was so heavily packed with heavy-weight planning lawyers to which my short answer was that planning is becoming ever-more complicated.
Perhaps, more specifically, establishing the principle of development for anything is becoming ever-more complicated to the extent that we almost have two planning systems. In one, where the principle of development has been or is relatively easy to establish, we can talk confidently about engaging communities and place-making and all of the good stuff. The big, sexy urban regeneration projects, for example.
In the other one, where the principle of development is yet to be established, we go around and around and around… Local plans that start and stop because of endless debates about housing numbers, Reserved Matters submissions on allocated sites refused against an officer’s recommendation, airport runways, bridge crossings, nuclear power stations, and so on, and so on…
In this second planning system life has become so complicated because, let's face it, nobody actually wants anything to happen anywhere. Objecting to planning applications has become a national pastime if not a national obsession.
At this juncture I would recommend this episode of The News Agents in which tech analyst Dan Wang draws the comparison ‘between China, an engineering state, and the "lawyerly societies" of America and the West, reflexively blocking everything’ (as Lisa suggested during episode 154, a guiding principle of planning reform is whether it increases or decreases the role of the planning lawyer).
Are the call-in provisions and a national scheme of delegation that I discussed with Charlotte, Andrew and Lisa not just this week’s attempts to circumvent local idiosyncrasies because no national politician is ever actually prepared to say ‘Sorry, 1960s Generation, this is happening, national priorities override local ones and we will not let you pull up the ladder behind you.’
And so around and around we go. Ergo, NDMPs, or national policies for decision-making, or whatever the fudge might be called this time.
All of that being said, let us wait and see what Planning Santa has in store for us this year. If what emerges does achieve the outcomes that I set out above then advocates for statutory NDMPs may have to have a humble pie rather than a mince pie with their festive sherry. If though what emerges does not achieve those outcomes then, well, again, let us wait and see, but the Secretary of State has committed to “leaving no stone unturned to build 1.5 million homes" and he will not have done.
Why will he not have done? Well town and country planning is very seldom a black and white endeavour and evidently there are arguments for and against, in this instance, statutory NDMPs. Here though was an opportunity to make town and country planning more of a black and white endeavour and yet instead even more shades of material considerations might be added. The only obvious reason as to why is that collectively we prefer it that way.
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