Pantomime Planning

I had to drive for an hour and twenty minutes to get to my first job. On a typical day the way home was a lot more bearable because at 2pm I would go out ‘looking for land’ and tootle my back from South Yorkshire to South Nottinghamshire by way of places like Alfreton and Gainsborough whilst listening to Mark & Lard (Google them, Kids…). The way in though was more of a chore and I filled the time by listening to the Today programme. ‘You are a grown up now. You should know what is going on in the world.’

The first time that I can really recall planning being featured on Today was the first NPPF so I had been working for over a decade by that point and had a fair idea of how the world worked. Then, as now, the Secretary of State got a few minutes at 8:10 and then, as also now, representatives of the CPRE and the development industry were invited to argue about whether there really was a ‘war on the countryside’ (Google that as well, Kids...). I recall thinking to myself that if the quality of the coverage of something that I knew a little about is that shallow then is the quality of the coverage about everything that shallow.

This came to mind first thing on Monday morning. I did what I usually do when I am at home: I went upstairs, I put the kettle on, I put the Today programme on, and I checked my phone. Somebody late on Sunday night had sent me an article in The Times.

Labour housebuilding target ‘completely out of reach’.

Well that is obviously not news...

The Government is due to build 400,000 fewer homes than it promised before the election, leading to a blame game between ministers, councils and developers.

Ah. Ok. Here we go…

Labour is on course to build 400,000 fewer homes than Sir Keir Starmer promised at the last election, official figures show, as anger grows among ministers at the slow rate at which developers are building.

Developers build to the rate of expected sale. Is that not widely understood? To do otherwise would be to have unbuilt stock sitting as work in progress on the balance sheet and accountants do not like work in progress sitting on balance sheets.

An assessment by officials at the Ministry of Housing reveals that the government expects to fall significantly short of its 1.5 million homes target despite unveiling a raft of policies designed to encourage development.

A raft? Grey Belt is a gamechanger. Grey Belt is transformative. Grey Belt will make a major contribution towards development land coming forward, but Grey Belt was not defined for the purposes of being the basis for a planning application until the NPPF and PPG were confirmed, which meant that applicants could not, for example, complete ecological surveys until the windows open in the Spring of 2025, but those applications are now in and making their way through the system. Of what else does this raft comprise?

The predicted shortfall has led to a blame game between ministers, councils and the housebuilding industry over who is responsible.

There it is. The ‘blame game’. Journalists like a blame game.

Steve Reed, the housing secretary, has accused some developers of “sitting” on planning permissions for viable projects and said they needed to “build out existing sites and bring forward more [sites], more quickly”.

Oh no.

A report from the Local Councils Network claimed that the number of sites with planning permission that were still not built exceeded the number of homes needed to hit the government’s 1.5 million target.

Punch.

A spokesman for the Home Builders Federation said: “The significant increase in taxes and policy costs that have been layered onto development are having a crippling impact on the viability of housebuilding.

Judy.

This was not the best start to the week.

A first thought.

The world would undoubtedly be a better place if representatives of the LGA and the HBF could be locked in a room and not released until it was agreed that the former will stop publishing it’s annual unbuilt planning permissions report provided that latter stops publishing it’s annual unspent developer contributions report.

Calculations suggesting there are over one million unbuilt planning permissions are too simplistic and don’t accurately reflect the realities of planning and housebuilding. Regular analysis comparing the number of new planning permissions and housebuilding completions suggests there are over one million homes with permission but unbuilt in England. The latest analysis is by the Local Government Association (LGA) and suggests that “More than 1.1 million homes granted planning permission in England in the last decade are yet to be built”. This is regularly cited as evidence of developer land banking and that the planning system is not a barrier to housebuilding. Unfortunately, the result is probably too high due to poor data and an overly simplistic calculation.

Not my words, Carol, but the words of Neal Hudson and the day that this no longer needs sharing will be a red letter one.

Matthew Pennycook has acknowledged the need to over-supply planning consents, but then that is easy for him to say because he does not have to grant them…

A second thought.

I have heard it suggested that the Government was somehow bounced into the 1.5m target by the development industry, which seems to both massively overexaggerate the role and influence of the development industry and underappreciate that ‘the Government’ is a not a single amorphous entity. Nobody in their right mind other than those responsible for drafting manifesto commitments simply on the basis that they should be bigger / better / faster than those of the other lot could and should have expected 1.5m homes to be built over this parliament. Every light on the dashboard (applications, consents, local plan submissions, and so on) was flashing amber. A target though it became and whilst some may have expressed surprise that both Angela Raynor and then Steve Reed committed to it, is holding the ‘party line’ not what ‘party people’ are expected to do?

The more nuanced and indeed the correct interpretation was that taken by Matthew Pennycook in saying that the new Government’s inheritance was so bad that it takes a bold and ambitious target to turn the oil tanker around as quickly as possible. That should still be the line to my unsophisticated mind.

Speaking to the point about over-supplying consents, the development industry position as far as I can recall was that to build 300,000 homes a year means planning to build 300,000 homes a year and that means a target of much more than 300,000 homes a year. There might be an argument to be had about how that target is calculated, but that simple point is a fact and anybody that does not accept it is not serious about building 300,000 homes a year.

A third thought.

Speaking to the point about the Government’s inheritance, an awful lot of levers are being pulled at the same time to try to do something about it. For example, and beyond Grey Belt and the standard method, changes to the NSIP regime and NPS, the NPPF and NDMPs, SDS, local plan-making reform, devolution, LGR, the Nature Restoration Fund, and so on and so on. There might be an argument to be had about the wisdom of taking all of this on at the same time and the order that it is being done, but that risks making perfect the enemy of the good. All of these areas need tackling and they, pace and efficacy aside, being tackled, which has to be a good thing right? Indeed, when you read about cross-cutting legal constraints, undefined departmental mission and the quango-industrial complex the surprise becomes less what is happening and more that anything is happening at all.

A government spokesman said the projections did not account for further changes to England’s planning laws and public sector investment in social housing.

That might be fair, but Juxtaposed with it is Matthew Pennycook’s observation that the government was “pulling every lever” to achieve the target. Statutory NDMPS, Minister? Demand-side support? How much public sector investment in social housing is out of the door and being spent?

Less facetiously but in all seriousness, what has changed on the ground? The initiatives listed above, laudable though they are, will precipitate a more functional planning system for the next Government to benefit from. What has been done, and I mean done, not talked about, not consulted upon, to actually make investing in land less costly and less risky and to shorten the time required to secure a planning permission?

Applicants in Tonbridge & Malling, for example, now have to demonstrate that there is adequate water infrastructure available, or whether it can be provided, to meet the needs of the proposed development. That is a systemic failure yet to be grappled with.

A fourth thought.

Speaking to the point about demand-side support, the news this week that Berkeley is withdrawing from the land market really should be the final canary in the coalmine.

“Big Yellow [the self storage group] is our biggest competitor because they don’t have all the taxes that we have,” Perrins said, adding that the land market has, in his opinion, become “overheated”.

Berkeley “does not believe it can make its required rate of return on investment in new land acquisitions” and so it will not be buying any new sites for the foreseeable future.

The company is also slowing its build rates “to match the sales rates we are currently achieving”, with mortgage rates having risen since the outbreak of the war in the Gulf. That decision was made partly in response to planning delays as well, with Berkeley waiting seven years to start building at one development in Kingston, west London.

“That can’t be right,” Perrins said. “No wonder no homes are getting built. It’s a real concern for the government, how they’re going to attract the £30 billion of investment needed to build these 88,000 homes [a year].”

It will not be though because, to paraphrase Nick Cuff, we are where we are because evidently this is where we want to be, but anybody not directly involved in development should be under no illusions as to how difficult development is at the best of times let alone now. If your instinctive response to this statement is that developers should cut their prices and their margins and pay less for land then please read this by Paul Smith.

‘This is all very interesting, Sam’, but…, I can hear you thinking, ‘…what is your point?’

A final thought.

My point is that everybody involved in that Times article will come away in the belief that they won. The journalist got his ‘blame game’ story and MHCLG, the Local Councils Network and the HBF all got their lines across.

The news cycle has moved on and today we are talking about Simon Dudley being sacked.

The optimist would say that all of this is just performative, that Steve Reed knows that developers do not sit on viable planning permissions. So why say it then? Pandering to the base? Counterpoint. Why write the election leaflets for candidates looking to take seats from Labour councillors in the local elections? Why not nip ‘landbanking’ in the bud once and all so that when the news cycle comes back around the next Times article can start from a better place than this one?

Trying to build 1.5m homes within the Parliament was absolutely the right target for this Government to adopt. It would have been the right target for whoever won the next election and it will be the right target for whoever wins the next election (and whoever that is will have a much better chance of doing so.)

It is complicated though, intensely complicated (this could have been a 20,000-word dissertation rather than a 2000-word brain dump of a blog) and meeting that target would have meant the alignment of factors not all of which are within any single party’s control. Why is that so hard for everybody to agree on? Are John Lennon and I the only dreamers?

The inevitable consequence of not doing so is that we will all lose. Candidates looking to take seats from Labour MPs will say that it was the wrong target. The wrong priority.

Oh yes they will.

Around and around we will go.