50 Shades of Planning

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