50 Shades of Planning

Colleagues asked me for 500 words for a corporate LinkedIn post and this is bang on 500 words. I will write something much, much longer at some point... In terms of excitement, Planning Reform Day, when it finally came, did not disappoint. A good proportion of my 500-word limit will be used listing everything that we were treated to, but it is worth doing so because it conveys just how many moving parts the planning system is comprised of. As well as the updated NPPF and the Government response to the consultation version, the Secretary of State gave a speech and the Minister gave a written statement to Parliament. There were letters to the Mayor of London about poor housing delivery and to recalcitrant LPAs about plan-making. There was updated Green Belt guidance, the 2022 Housing Delivery Test results, and an announcement about recipients of the Planning Skills Delivery fund. There was, perhaps unsurprisingly, something within all of this for almost everybody. For those who would lik

The Government published a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) Action Plan in February 2023 and committed to bringing forward reforms “to ensure the existing system can support our future infrastructure needs by making the NSIP consenting process better, faster, greener, fairer and more resilient by 2025”. Subsequent to that the Government consulted in July 2023 on operational NSIP changes to “make the system work more effectively for applicants, local authorities and communities”. The NSIP Action Plan was silent, however, on an important question that was included in the 2020 “ Planning for the Future ” white paper, which was case for allowing new settlements to be brought forward under the NSIP regime. The development industry, so I am led to believe, was supportive of this and, with the ' next generation of new towns ' back on the agenda, this is a question that it might be timely to revisit. The case for doing so is twofold. Firstly, the size of site

Simon Wicks, editor of the RTPI's 'The Planner', collared me after the RTPI Young Planners Conference in Birmingham a couple of months ago and asked me write 390 words for the upcoming edition. I proudly accepted this kind invitation and duly wrote 390 words on Westminster's intoxication with planning reform and what could be achieved without it. I am sharing it here for anybody who is not a RTPI member and may be interested in reading it. Thanks to Simon for the opportunity and for the title. In the same way that objecting to planning applications has become a national pastime, expounding in abstract terms on the need for planning reform has become a hobby for many in Westminster. As has been demonstrated of late though, ‘ levelling the foundations and building, from the ground up, a whole new planning system for England ’ is harder than it sounds. Of greater importance right now is surely just getting the wheels back on the wagon and getting the wagon moving in the ri

In a letter sent to all Council Leaders and Chief Executives in September Michael Gove set out an expectation that “development should proceed on sites that are adopted in a local plan with full input from the local community unless there are strong reasons why it cannot”. Putting aside Mr Gove’s proclivity for interfering in what might reasonably be called local affairs (Exhibits A , B and C ), to what might this be referring? Presumably it is the phenomenon (illustrated below in meme form) whereby a planning committee overturns a recommendation from officers to approve applications on allocated sites or, worse still, reserved matters submissions pursuant to outline applications on allocated sites. Perhaps one way of addressing this is to consider a national scheme of delegation. At present every council has it’s own scheme of delegation and given the myriad reasons why a council decides that a decision should be made by a committee rather than delegated to officers, as outlined in

Land availability is consistently cited by SME builders as a being a major issue. 52% of respondents to a HBF survey identified it as a barrier to growth, which was up from 47% in 2021 and 32% in 2020. The downward trend in the number of active SMEs ( HBF estimate that SMEs comprised an annual average of 39% of new build delivery before 1990, falling to just 12% in 2017) is surely driven at least in part by the paucity of opportunities for development being provided by the planning system. Savills has identified that in 2011, so before the NPPF, the average size of a local plan allocation was 35 hectares. Between 2012 and 2016 though the average allocation had risen to 60 hectares. Between 2017 and 2021 it was 69 hectares.   Savills identified a similar pattern in the number of sites gaining full consent. In 2012, sites with capacity for over 1000 homes comprised less than 2% of all consents granted. That proportion had risen to 10% by 2020. In contrast, the number of homes being de

Part 1 (18-09-23). If you did not watch the first part of this after the England game last night it is very much worth your time. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001rkn5/britains-housing-crisis-what-went-wrong The development industry was probably wary of a hatchet job, but my sense was that it was the short-term nature of political decision-making that came out as the villain of the piece. It certainly highlighted to me that anybody harbouring anger, resentment and bitterness towards the development industry because the government chooses to subsidise the private rental market and first time buyers rather than subside homes for social rent, which I'm sure some people do, would be better served directing that anger, resentment and bitterness elsewhere. Politics, as was said, is choices... Landbanking got a mention, of course, but responses to that are pretty well rehearsed now and, whisper it quietly, I think starting to become more widely appreciated and understood (

With Labour so far ahead in the polls and seemingly likely to form the next Government the planning profession is starting to think less about the tail end of this round of reform and more about what the next one will bring. A press release was published alongside Kier Starmer's conference speech last week, during which the Labour Leader "pledged to get Britain building again and save the dream of homeownership for younger people" and announced a "transformational package of reforms to the planning system to build 1.5 million homes over the next Parliament". That press release is on the Labour website, but it does not include the 'notes to editors', which I reproduce for general consumption below because it includes some really interesting detail. Some initial observations. The tone is quite striking. 'Egregiously', for example, which is used in the context of delayed local plans, means 'outstandingly bad' or 'shocking'. Arguably

You sometimes hear football commentators and pundits say that a referee has had a good game if they have not been noticed. Does that maxim, noticing something by not noticing it, apply to the planning system? Are people sufficiently animated by planning issues, be they urban or rural, be they matters of local or national significance, to be at least aware that the system exists and perhaps even, if they are, to have an opinion about how well or otherwise it is operating? Does it matter if they are not? This, which I came across within  YouGov’s daily survey material, is want prompted that train of thought. Over 50% of people do not have a strong opinion, based upon everything that they have seen and heard (including rules on housebuilding), about the planning system. 21% are ‘yeah, whatever, steady away’ and 33% don’t know, which can probably be translated as ‘don’t care’. That sounds a lot, but does it matter? Perhaps the public are just happy for planners to quietly, unnot

The first bit On the day that I started writing this the Prime Minister has confirmed in a move considered intellectually incoherent by some that hundreds of new oil and gas licenses will be granted in the UK, which signals that it is ‘Energy Week’ on the Government’s summer recess comms grid. A line appears to have been drawn from the role of an Ultra Low Emission Zone policy in securing a marginal win for the Conservatives in the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election to the softening of commitments to a net zero energy strategy. Seven days ago the Prime Minister launched the grid’s ‘Planning Reform Week’ by announcing that the Government will meet its manifesto commitment to build 1 million homes over this parliament, which would represent “another important milestone in the government’s already successful housebuilding strategy”. It is notable given the ground that Labour has gained on housing in recent months that the first week of the parliamentary recess was devoted to tryin