Notes on reform: the Government gives up
Turn the lights off on your way out, friends.
The weirdest bit of all is that until just months ago, fixing our obviously and painfully broken housing market was orthodox Conservative party policy. For instance:
“Our broken housing market is one of the greatest barriers to progress in Britain today. Whether buying or renting, the fact is that housing is increasingly unaffordable – particularly for ordinary working class people who are struggling to get by […] The starting point is to build more homes.”
Who said that? What out-of-touch developer-friendly Yimby monster? None other than the Rt Hon Theresa May MP when she was Prime Minister introducing that Government’s attempts to fix the broken housing market.
Ready to play again? Ok:
“Debates about housing numbers tend to dominate this process, and a standard method for setting housing requirements would significantly reduce the time it takes to establish the amount of land to release in each area. This has historically been a time-consuming process which ultimately has not led to enough land being released where it is most needed (as reflected by worsening affordability). A standard requirement would differ from the current system of local housing need in that it would be binding, and so drive greater land release.”
Which Green Belt-loathing urban hipster produced that errant nonsense? You guessed it: Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Secretary of State Robert Jenrick only a couple of years ago making a case for mandatory housing targets. They called that case “Planning for the Future”.
What on earth, then, do we call the series of announcements this week. Most of which sketch an agenda which is just about the exact opposite. Well, Toto, we aren’t planning for the future anymore. Which means, I guess, that we’re planning… for the past.
So what has actually happened? Let’s start with the source material:
My last post handed out gongs for some of the stupidest proposed amendments to Levelling up and Regeneration Bill I could find. I was absolutely sure no government in its right mind could get on board with that kind of claptrap. Ah. What a fool I was. Michael Gove promised to “compromise” with the dastardly rebel alliance, and that led to…
Yesterday, Gove published two things. First, a letter to local authorities: here. Second, a written ministerial statement: here. More on what they say in a moment.
Finally, to add insult to injury, we have the latest proposed amendments to LURB: here. The bananas Villiers ones are all gone now. That’s the way “compromise” works, friends. Welcome to Westminster. But in their place, we have come more real peaches. More of which in a sec.
And what’s coming next? It’s consultation time. Sharpen those pencils. We’re to be asked about an NPPF “prospectus” which sets out more detail on the promises Gove’s been making this week - that’s now due before Christmas. After which, the Government is expecting to adopt a new NPPF by April 2023.
So what’s this week’s big idea? I’ll give you 5 of the worst ones. But only 5:
Housing targets won’t be mandatory “any more”. This seems - to my untutored eye - to be a cunning Govian non-concession to the Villiers rabble. Because, of course, housing targets weren’t mandatory in the first place. They really weren’t. Of course, the only way of ferreting out that bit of information would be to actually read the Planning Practice Guidance - and who has the time. But if you did, you’d see that it literally says “Is the use of the standard method for strategic policy making purposes mandatory? No.” Heck, only the other day in Worthing, a Planning Inspector decided that an authority with a standard method figure of 885 homes a year could plan for only 230 a year. Does that sound Stalinist to you? Naaah. As I said here. Not Stalinist. And not mandatory either. No doubt local politicians will be given new weird and wonderful ways of failing to plan to meet their most basic responsibilities to the next generation, but the detail will come in the prospectus. Merry Christmas.
5 year housing land supply - which seems to be the one policy mechanism which actually works sometimes in persuading at least a handful of local members to get on and adopt plans - is being diluted. Big time. I talked about the main idea - no requirement to demonstrate a 5 year housing land supply in areas with a recently adopted local plan - here. I don’t think it will work. And it definitely won’t help. Otherwise, Gove’s bending over backwards to make the numbers gentler for local authorities with technical but important proposed tweaks like ditching a 20% buffer requirement for really poor performers, “crediting” authorities who have - quote unquote - “over-performed” in previous years, and knocking the requirement down to 4 years of housing land supply for certain authorities who are at an advanced stage of bringing their local plans forward. Without getting lost in detail - the purpose of all this “compromise” is to make the policy less effective, and thereby to reduce overall housing delivery. So if your diagnosis is that the housing market is already delivering too many houses too efficiently and effectively to meet too many of our needs, then you’re in luck. Here’s your prescription.
Gove’s going to consult on how to turn down your application because of your poor “character”. On why this is a stupid and dangerous idea, see my previous post. Still. It’s a sop to team Villiers. It’s a promise to consult, not a promise to do anything. And at least he doesn’t appear to be running with the “community right to appeal” nonsense. Not yet anyway.
“I will ensure that plans no longer have to be ‘justified’”. Well. I mean. Thank heavens for that. Justified plans. Whatever next!
“we will be clear that local planning authorities are not expected to review the Green Belt to deliver housing.” For seasoned readers, I get a creeping suspicion I’m starting to sound like a broken record on this topic. But I mean. This suggestion is absurd. It’s bananas. For reasons I’ve already set out e.g. here. But I’ll give you one more worked example of why it’s such a silly idea, and I’ll do with reference to one of the more insidious new proposed amendments to LURB. Let us take……. St Albans in Hertfordshire.
Quick hit St Albans facts:
Its most “recent” development plan document dates back to November 1994 (when Baby D bestrode the charts with Let Me Be Your Fantasy). And no hope of a new plan until at least 2025.
How’s it going? It’s going terribly. St Albans is failing to deliver against its affordable housing needs not by tens or hundreds but thousands and thousands of homes. And it’s projecting shortfalls of housing delivery over the next 5 years of thousands of homes. As a consequence of these failures, St Albans is one of the least affordable areas in England.
Why is that? Well:
See all that green? Over 80% of St Albans falls within the Metropolitan Green Belt. Everything outside the built up area boundaries (which of course are themselves the product of a totally different generation of plan-making). Is it designated for its gorgeous landscapes or precious habitats? Nope. Not a bit of it. It’s designated to stop “sprawl” out of London. Let’s be clear: this is about urban containment. And of course - one person’s sprawl is another person’s home. Anyway…
The point is: stopping people from living in St Albans is a bad idea. Because parts of this district are very highly sustainable. Indeed, much of it’s on the fringes of North London not far from where I’m typing away now - it’s a 30 minute train into St Pancras from St Albans. There’s no doubt about it. Lots and lots of people want to live in St Albans. And any sane planning system would find a way to allowing more of them to do it.
It is inevitable that coming anywhere remotely close to meeting St Albans demographically derived requirements for market and affordable housing will require the use of land which is currently in the Green Belt. Inevitable. It’s not an option. That’s no surprise. There’s been no strategic review of Hertfordshire’s Green Belt in almost 40 years. Something has to give. So the NPPF telling St Albans not to review its Green Belt boundaries to meet housing need in the future would be, in effect, telling St Albans to chuck in the towel and give up. Draw up the drawbridge. For those of you who already own a home, congratulations. Happy days. For the rest of you, well… there’s always Stevenage.
Of course, if plan-making doesn’t review Green Belt boundaries, that only heaps more pressure onto development management. Planning applications. And inevitable appeals. And that’s where the latest proposed #LURB amendments come in. In 2020, I acted as part of an appeal team which achieved a permission for 100 homes on an unallocated greenfield Green Belt site in St Albans - more details about that here. The site was called Roundhouse Farm, Colney Heath - you can read it here.
I’ll tell you someone who read it: Lib Dem MP for St Albans Daisy Cooper. She read it alright. And she didn’t like it. She called a whole Parliamentary debate to complain about it. You can read her speech here. She called it a “shock” decision and asked the Government to “intervene” and to change planning policy to stop it happening again. They didn’t change planning policy. They didn’t intervene.
Annnnnyway, scroll ahead to yesterday and we have one of the latest amendments proposed to LURB:
Ms Cooper’s so cross about an appeal decision from 2020 for 100 homes that she thinks it’s time to change the law. But ask yourself: why on earth shouldn’t unmet housing need - when it’s on so gross and extreme a scale as we find in Ms Cooper’s constituency - form part of a case for justifying a new scheme in the Green Belt? I can’t think of a good reason. The test for “very special circumstances” to justify new buildings in the Green Belt is simple. In effect: you ask if the scheme’s benefits clearly outweigh its harms. So. If your scheme is a housing scheme, and it delivers all of the important benefits which come with market and affordable housing, then isn’t it obvious? To weigh those benefits properly, to get the balance right, to reach a sane conclusion: the nature and scale of need for that housing matters.
If you can’t review Green Belt boundaries through the local plan process and you can’t allow any planning applications in the Green Belt… does that mean that development in places like St Albans just… stops? Game over?
Of course that’s just St Albans. It’s only one example. The issues raised by these proposed “reforms” could bring new development to an end across wide swathes of England. And that’s a feature, not a bug, of these proposals. It’s the whole point.
We can take a few lessons from this merry saga:
Be careful what you wish for. One day, you’re celebrating winning an appeal. The next, an MP is trying to legislate your case out of existence.
It isn‘t just the Tories who say stupid things about the Green Belt. The Lib Dems have a strong line here too.
Who knows if amendments like this will actually gain traction. Still less make it onto the statute book. But there’s an interesting discussion for another day here. On the strangeness (and, I think, ineffectiveness) of MPs using LURB as a legislative vehicle to try to force the Government to re-write its national planning policy. More of that for the keenos in a future post.
Could it get much worse, friends? Really? Could it? Oh, come on. We’ve not even had the proper prospectus to read through yet. Then the games really begin. In the meantime, #planoraks, please stay well. Try not to lose your minds with these incessant updates from mission control. Enjoy the coming cold snap. Wrap up warm. And - heavens knows how - do your very best. To #keeponplanning.
