“Robust, over-cluttered, under-resourced” - my favourite response to the Planning White Paper
And… time up. Pencils down, please, everyone. Thank you.
The White Paper consultation (after several decades, or that’s how it feels) has finally come to a close. The longest consultation in human history. The paper that launched a thousand webinars - and a fair few blog posts. Well, whatever happens - at least it gave us something to talk about.
And the responses are in. What do they tell us? Well, it’s US Election day, folks, so as Abraham Lincoln might’ve said about planning reform:
You can’t please any of the people any of the time. But you can rile up all of the people at once. I jest (sort of).
So, come on! Spill the beans. What did you all say? If you’re interested, here’s a flavour of what a few others have sent in, and the kind of responses the good people at the Ministry will be working through this lock-down season. In no particular order:
RTPI: here.
Planning Officers Society: here.
District Councils Network: here.
County Councils Network: here.
The Mayor of London: here.
British Property Federation: here.
BPF Industrial Committee: here.
The Housing Forum: here.
RIBA: here.
Planning & Environmental Bar Association: here.
Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport: here.
The Landscape Institute: here.
Just Space: here.
What do we see in that small smattering of responses? Healthy debate, that’s what. For instance:
A fair dose of scepticism on (what many seem to think are) over-simplified ideas about the new 3-zone system about growth areas, protect areas and the rest. Something that looks like a consensus [planners? consensus? must be some mistake] around putting more “nuance” (as the BPF put it) in that tri-partite idea. More detail. Unpicking the concepts. Breaking down the simple (and - so the RTPI and the Mayor of London think - simplistic, or as the LDPF puts it - superficial) classifications in the White Paper. Some of these responses are a bit of a call for nuts and bolts. Not glamorous, perhaps. But they read to me like a reaction against the idea that the English planning system really can be boiled down into such basic concepts. In the end, we know it’s not as simple as that. Don’t we?
Lots of healthy scepticism about what a new statutory “sustainable development” test would actually mean and how it would work.
A bit of incredulity from some on how likely it is the new 30 month end-to-end idea for local plans will actually happen. More in a forthcoming blog post on the sad sight of Councils downing tools on their current plan-making pending the outcome of this review.
Understandable kick-back from many on the idea of ditching the requirement for Councils to show a 5 year housing land supply.
Lots of sensible suggestions about the future of strategic planning - both from the RTPI and the County Councils Network, informed in the latter case by the report I wrote about here. See also PEBA’s idea of grouping LPAs into strategic “Housing Delivery Areas”. No doubt about it - strategic planning’s coming back into fashion.
Some disagreement between e.g. the development industry and the RTPI on the desirability of a national housing plan. And let me tell you, #planoraks: we’re at the tip of the iceberg on the toxic politics of that debate.
I could go on all day [please don’t, Ed.].
But here’s some good news.
The consultation response I enjoyed the most will only take you 2 minutes to read - in fact, just finish this post and you’ve more or less covered it. Lord Carnwath - you remember him, ex-Supreme Court judge, member of my alma mater Landmark Chambers, and someone who knows just a little bit about planning (aka he wrote almost all of the main Supreme Court decisions on planning during his 2012 - 2020 stint, and bucket-loads of seminal Court of Appeal judgments before that). Yes. Let’s face it. This is the chap who’s probably responsible for shaping our planning law more than anyone else alive.
Ok, so what did he think? Well here it is.
Vintage Carnwath. Pithy. Clear. So clear actually that it almost starts to look obvious. Well, you see - that’s his trick. You see it in judgment after judgment. It isn’t obvious at all. Good writing and clear thinking just makes it look that way.
Lord Carnwath appends a note from Matthew Dale-Harris, a super junior barrister also at Landmark, which is an excellent summary of some of the attempted reforms over the last 50 years. And Lord C concludes:
[T]here have been frequent and often inconsistent changes since [2001], which have achieved little more than adding to the complexity of the system.
[…]
Against that background, my simple advice to government now is not to repeat the mistakes of the past. In my experience of 50 years, the planning system is soundly based and in general has served us well, but has not been assisted by frequent changes of policy direction. There appears much in principle to admire in the White Paper, such as simplifying the plan-making process, improving design quality and delivering a more responsive and modern approach to consultation and infrastructure planning, although the detail needs to be worked out. However, with respect to the Prime Minister, there is no justification for (in the words of his introduction) “levelling the foundations and building, from the ground up, a whole new planning system for England”. Radical reform is rarely a sensible solution, not least because of the disruption it causes. The White Paper does not begin to make a case for it in the present context.
In short, in answer to your first consultation question, my three-word description of the present system would be: “robust, but over-cluttered, and under-resourced”. The aim should be to build on the strengths of the existing system, reduce the clutter, and ensure adequate resources, in terms of finance and personnel; and above all to provide a period of policy stability to allow the reformed system to be settle down and gain public understanding and confidence.
If you only read 1 response, #planoraks, there it is.
Robust. Over-cluttered. Under-resourced.
You know, of all the gimmicky attempts we’ve seen in the last 2 months trying to distil the state of the planning system into 3 words - those are the 3 which capture it best for me. The system needs a clean-out. Course it does. It probably always has. It is also in dire need of better resourcing. As regular readers know well, I have some major bugbears - the most major of which, Green Belt policy, isn’t being touched one iota by this consultation.
In the end, the vast majority of what I experience every day adds up to a system I am proud to work in. And one which - most of the time, anyway - produces results which are robust. Sure, they don’t make all the people happy all of the time. They barely make some the people happy any of the time. But disgruntlement can be the sign of a system working. Heaven help us all if we lose sight of the importance of healthy disagreement about issues which are so important for our shared future.
So hear, hear Lord Carnwath. Now let’s stand back and watch as the Government proceeds with the happy business of tearing the whole system down.
Stay well, #planoraks. And keep on planning.
