"The government’s ambitious and unyielding housing target means that our planning system is under extreme pressure to perform: to not only function effectively but more than double the number of housing consents achieved in recent years"
- Ian Barnett - Leaders Romans Group
A new Planning and Infrastructure Bill is now working its way through Parliament. Alongside changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), the English Devolution White Paper, various planning working papers, and the ongoing consultation on a new Land Use Framework, this is quite a significant output for the government’s first half-year, but will it have the desired effect of delivering housing and growth?
The government’s ambitious and unyielding housing target means that our planning system is under extreme pressure to perform: to not only function effectively but more than double the number of housing consents achieved in recent years. Moreover, the growth agenda includes the homes and the energy, transport, and community infrastructure necessary to create thriving communities.
I have long argued that what is needed is a national plan - one that removes short-term politics from the equation and allows professionals to lead a coherent, long-term development strategy. For years, housing delivery has been hindered by the tension between national targets and local opposition.
This would set out a clear framework for where and how development should take place, ensuring that housing, infrastructure, and economic growth are planned in a coordinated manner. Such an approach would offer several key benefits: it would give the private sector greater confidence to invest in housing and infrastructure projects, reducing the risk (and costs) associated with navigating a fragmented and politically volatile planning system, better-aligning housing and associated infrastructure; depoliticise planning, and address regional disparities.
The government is currently consulting on a Land Use Framework, to be published later this year. Its contents will include the principles that the government will apply to policy with land use implications, a description of how policy levers will develop and adapt to support land use change; a release of land use data and analysis to support public and private sector innovation in spatial decision making, and the development of tools to support land managers in practice.
The consultation document makes a commitment to ‘taking a spatial approach’, stating in this context how location and climate change impact land use and must be taken into account at a national level, along with the use of ‘land use incentives’ and transforming, ‘how Government makes policy and the information we provide to decision-makers’.
But on reading the document, I feel that the strategic, spatial approach is lacking: it appears to make the assumption that each piece of land has just one use – failing to fully appreciate, for example, that housing developments can deliver shade and biodiversity without land having to be singled out for this purpose. Interestingly, this document – which is produced by DEFRA, not the MHCLG – makes only one reference to the National Planning Policy Framework.
Ditto biodiversity net gain (BNG) despite the fact that BNG provides the vital link between housing (and, from November this year, infrastructure, too) and environmental protection. So the intent is there, but there does seem to be an absence of joined-up thinking.
To bring about growth, spatial planning must function at a higher tier of government. While there is undoubtedly a role for local voices in development decisions, as we have seen from planning under the previous government, local politics is a thorn in the side of development. Compare the derisory number of homes built under the last government with the New Towns programme of the 1950s and
1960s: it is clear from the New Towns Delivery Programme, which required an Act of Parliament and the establishment of development corporations, that housing figures are only ever truly met when decisions are taken outside the remit of local authorities.
In my view, a national spatial plan is the obvious answer. One option is the return of the National Infrastructure Committee and an ‘infrastructure first’ approach, which brings together infrastructure, housing, energy and climate change in a de-politicised environment to expedite the creation of new settlements.
In terms of removing the influence of politics in the allocation of land, there is much that we could learn from the German or Dutch systems. Germany’s strategic planning decisions are made through a series of regional plans at a federal level; the Netherlands has a system more akin to a single national plan. Both countries are seen as having exemplary planning systems which allows development to proceed largely unhampered by political interference.
In the UK, the closest we ever got to this model was the Regional Spatial Strategies (RSS). RSS established a spatial vision and strategy specific to a region, for example, including the identification of areas for development with a 20-year timescale while also providing direction for Local Development Frameworks on a local (borough/district) level.
As the New Towns programme shows, when planning works, it is top-down rather than bottom-up. A national spatial plan would properly plan for the development that this country needs. Community involvement would have a role to play within this national approach. But the engagement process must be efficient (is three rounds of consultation on a design code alone really the best route to fast-tracking development?), and it must be consistent across the country.
As Neighbourhood Planning has demonstrated, the potential for a specific community to impact planning decisions lies in that community’s demographic: those communities with a professional, prosperous and permanent demographic are likely to exert more power on local issues than deprived areas and those with more transient communities.
This factor cannot be changed by sound bites and empty promises; only through a very long-term investment in community development, creating genuine opportunities for involvement and involving a representative sample of the local community can this be achieved. To do so would require the planning system to pay more attention to the ‘hard to reach’ – for example the young, those in full-time work or those busy raising children – those people who are perhaps more likely to be in need of affordable housing options.
An important component of a national spatial plan would be a comprehensive Green Belt review. The government has already made bold moves to enable Green Belt release – specifically, the coining of the term Grey Belt to determine land suitable for use. But Grey Belt has proven to be problematic. It works well as a slogan: it’s simple and concise, visual and intriguing, immediately evoking images of unattractive scraps of land which would benefit from redevelopment.
But, as the House of Lords Built Environment Committee inquiry into the Grey Belt concluded, the Green Belt definition has been, ‘implemented in a somewhat rushed and incoherent manner,’ and the inquiry said it did not believe ‘that it is likely to have any significant or lasting impact on planning decision-making or on achieving the government’s target of 1.5 million new homes by the end of this parliament’.
In my view, the updated guidance will lead to a plethora of speculative applications and appeals, each aiming to determine whether a site is Green or Grey Belt.
If the objective is simply to build more houses (or at least grant more planning permissions), then this will undoubtedly happen as a result of the new NPPF and PPG.
However, if the government’s intention is to deliver housing at the required scale in the right areas through a plan-led system, then a different approach would be better – by which I mean a national review of the Green Belt as an important component of the national plan.
We review our Local Plans every five years (at least supposedly). A review of the Green Belt needs to be undertaken in the context of the needs of the country – transport, environment, housing, leisure, food, and economics.
My view is that housing targets can only be met if development is assessed and brought forward at a national level. After years of NIMBY appeasement by MPs with responsibility for addressing the housing crisis, this will be difficult politically – but so is the risk of failing to meet the ‘almighty challenge’ (to quote Keir Starmer) of 1.5 homes this Parliament. A national plan is the government’s greatest hope of success.
