YIMBYs and NIMBYs. Is planning becoming a new front in the culture war?

Prepare the barricades, fellow planners; dig out a shelter at the bottom of your garden (if you are lucky enough to have a garden…); and stock up on tins of non-perishable food. There might be a culture war coming and a good planner always spots trouble before it arrives...

Given broader cultural, media and political trends it was perhaps only a matter of time before the built environment was subject to the same us versus them, progressive versus regressive factionalism that mars other aspects of public policy and debate.

Twitter, of course, is not representative of public opinion, but it can be representative of the cultural, media and political influencers that are shaping it and I spotted this image on there recently. As far as I could tell it was a Brit that posted it and so it is not one of those unseemly intellectual skirmishes breezily dismissed as something our crazy, madcap cousins on the other side of the Atlantic occupy themselves with.

Stereotypes are sometimes funny and sometimes true, but they are almost always harmful. This though is way beyond the pale. Whilst, of course, the NIMBY label can be worn well by those wrapping up the protection of their own house price in a cloak of pseudo-environmentalism, it can detract from the community champions that are just trying to champion their communities. Similarly, whilst, of course, the YIMBY label can be worn well by those in their cosy conservation areas who might just be able to see from their en suite window the towers they are so keen to support next to their nearest tube stop, it can detract from the campaigners selflessly doing their bit to awaken the silent unhoused majority and change public perceptions of new development. NIMBY and YIMBY cover a multitude of sins and a multitude of virtues, but this image does not even try to feign interest in the reasons why people might engage with the planning system.

Alas it is not hard to see why we are where are. For the stereotypical NIMBY, planning is being done to them. Local plan coverage remains steadfastly poor, there is downward pressure on land supply in areas with upward pressure on house prices, and where the presumption in favour of sustainable development and the tilted balance are engaged appeals are upheld even if the parish council has gone through the aggravation of getting a neighbourhood plan in place. Whilst all that is going on, for the stereotypical YIMBY, no planning is being done for anyone. They will park their bike next to a half-occupied trading estate within a two minute walk of tube stop and ask their Twitter followers why it has not yet come forward to development. This report from Grosvenor on trust in the planning system is instructive.

It does not have to be this way. I do not know if there is any more recent survey data than this, but I was reminded of a very old 50 Shades blog in which I referred to YouGov data on whether decisions to site new towns or major new housing projects should be taken nationally, regionally or locally. 76% of people were happy for such decisions to be taken at a greater-than-local level, which, I took to mean then and I still take to mean now, that the public accept that there are some decisions that need to be made in the public interest and for the greater good. The RTPI’s tagline used to be ‘the mediation of space, making of place’, and my sense is that most people would happily put their faith in a planning system that mediated their private interests in an accessible public forum, but to what extent can that genuinely be said to be happening?

At the greater-than-local level planning has effectively left the metaphorical pitch for the protagonists to argue amongst themselves. Of the three main reasons why local plans do not progress, the Housing & Planning Minister has already dismissed out of hand suggestions from the HCLG Committee for a review of Green Belt policy; the Government is retreating from a suggestion in the White Paper that binding housing targets be set centrally; and the duty-to-cooperate is to be replaced by something, but nobody knows what. More focus on these issues, and less focus on protecting statues, might help to build faith in planning at this greater-than-local level.

Down at the half-occupied trading estate within a two minute walk of a tube stop, planning consultants acting for the pension fund that owns it cannot find any substantive, up-to-date policies against which to prepare a report on it’s development potential and officers are too busy dealing with the sites that they would rather not see come forward than proactively plan for those that should. There is the option to pay £10,000 for a formal pre-application process, but there is no guarantee of a response within six months. Is the site suitable for six stories? Eight stories? Twelve stories? Even if the local authority was willing to recommend an application for approval, and even if the wind was blowing in the right direction at committee that evening, who is to say that the Secretary of State would not call the application in if enough MPs were sufficiently agitated to request such. Would more codification (with ‘democracy moved forward’, as Nicholas Boys Smith writes here), and less discretion help to build faith in planning at this local level? That to me seems worth a try.

Who knows? Perhaps I am reading too much into a single image, but it is not hard to imagine a YIMBY versus NIMBY narrative starting to take hold. It is simplistic, it is antagonistic, and it is easy to perpetuate, which makes it perfect culture war ammunition. Not every brownfield site is appropriate for development and not every greenfield site is inappropriate for development. Planning is not, as somebody once said, a black and white endeavour, and unlike other fields on which phoney cultural turf wars are being fought, there are rules and there are referees. The referees are us planners and the rules are defined within the planning system. Everybody should be able to put their faith in it.