“No Minister” - 8 clangers at the Select Committee
We all have our favourites. But for me, it’s easy: on that top-5 Mount Rushmore of great TV drama, it goes “The Wire” < “The West Wing” < “The Sopranos” < “Succession” < and [… way out ahead, reigning supreme…] Rachel Maclean MP’s clanger-tastic appearance last week before the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee.
Come on! You didn’t miss it, did you? Worry not. If you’ve a spare 2 hours, you can catch up right now: here. You’d prefer a blow-by-blow transcript? Well of course: here.
That said, if you’re after a properly spoiler-free experience, can I suggest that you watch/read it all before ploughing on into the rest of this post. Fair warning, friends. What follows below is flush with spoilers. Proceed at your peril.
Before we get there, you know it’s a slow news weekend when planning reform’s splashed over the front pages. After Keir Starmer started dropping hints to the Economist a few days ago, we’re now told that the Labour Party’s vision for the planning system includes promises:
To “restore housebuilding targets and hand more power to local authorities” [A little self-contradictory, Ed?]
That “Councils would be made to work together to come up with plans for development at a regional level” [YES!]
That “Starmer’s government would also look anew at the green belt, swathes of which — including a petrol station in Tottenham Hale, north London — are neither green nor pleasant. Those sites would be liberated.” [YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!]
Plus “intensive development on the 50-mile Oxford-Cambridge Arc and a generation of new towns” [Now we’re talking]
Can it be so? Has Christmas come early? A national conversation about Green Belt reform, strategic planning and housing targets. Finally, #planoraks. A general election campaign for us.
Annnnnyway, back to the system we currently have. Let’s take a step back:
The Minister for Housing and Planning. What a job. In the future, all of us will be Housing Minister for 15 minutes. In the present, we have had… drumroll… 15 housing ministers since the Tories came into power in 2010. And more amazingly, 6 of them have come and gone since February last year.
In February 2023, Rachel Maclean - MP for Redditch - stepped up to the plate. And last week was her first outing before the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee, that crack cross-party group of MPs chaired by the very shrewd Clive Betts MP from Sheffield. The minister was accompanied on her big day out by Emran Mian, the Director General at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities who is responsible for regeneration, which includes housing and planning. The Select Committee has lots of inquiries on the go, and one of them is into the Government’s proposals to reform the planning system. You know. These ones.
There was a lot to cover! With more simultaneous rounds of consultation on the go than the minister was able to count, with tens of thousands of responses to wade through, what is the Minister planning for us all? What is her response to some of the abject horror with which some of these reform proposals have been met (not least, I’m sorry to say, in these pages).
So. Here are 8 (almost entirely depressing) take-aways for you. Each one, to make it easier for the true planoraks to source in the transcript, comes with a “Q” number so you can see the full context here.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin…
No date for any response to the NPPF consultation: Q165
There were some of us - heck, I was one - who’d assumed we’d have a new NPPF by now. Not only was I wrong. I was really wrong [Nothing new there, Ed.]. The Minister’s answers suggest that a revised NPPF is some time off. They’re still wading through some 26,000 responses. No end is in sight. No deadline was offered. We didn’t even get one of the old chestnuts like “within coming months”, or “some time before the Autumn” or even “in due course”. Ominous stuff. Because, I’m sorry to say, the Government has mixed form on responding to planning consultations. Some of you will be old enough to remember the 2020 Planning for the Future Consultation. Well. They never responded to that one.
No evidence for what NPPF changes have done or will do: Q59, Q66, Q73, Q90.
The Minister was asked whether for “each of the changes made from the NPPF changes initially onwards there has been a detailed study of what has worked and how well it has worked”. Answer: nope. She was then asked if there was “any evidence to suggest that the changes that were made in the 6 December statement are going to lead to more local plans being adopted”. Answer: again, nope. Emran Mian said that the Department is looking to this consultation exercise to provide them with that evidence. We shall see. I wrote last time about the HBF’s response to the consultation which included an analysis from Lichfields which suggests that the proposed NPPF changes will themselves result in around 77,000 fewer new homes per year. Does the Government accept that figure? Nope. Do they yet have any evidence to rebut the figure? Nope. But apparently a rebuttal is being worked up - good luck with that one. Is there any evidential basis to support the 35% “urban uplift” figure for housing targets in (generally Labour) larger towns and cities? Not a sausage. The 35% figure was “plucked from thin air”. No wonder our Government is so set on removing the requirement for local plans to be supported by any evidence.
No mechanism to reach the 300,000 homes target: Q69, Q77, Q87.
The Minister was keen to emphasise how “advisory”, aka non-binding, local housing targets would be in the world of the new NPPF. I think it’s a troubling idea - more on that here. But nobody voted for me. Anyway. The Minister also repeated that the Government is sticking to its 300,000 net additional homes a year overall target. But, of course, there is (as Andrew Lewer MP poetically described it in his question to the Minster) “a gargantuan Titanic iceberg-sized hole” in that strategy. Because if local housing targets are only “advisory”, then what is the mechanism to ensure that in the end we reach 300,000 homes nationally? And what is the plan B if we fall short? We can be blunt, can’t we, you and me. We’re between friends. Well, it turns out: there is no mechanism, and there is no plan B. What will be the “flexible” exceptions that could justify a local authority departing from the local housing need target? The minister had no idea. Are you getting excited yet?
No target for affordable homes: Q120.
There are some parts of the plan-o-sphere where “target” has become a dirty word. Not in these pages. As you all know already, targets drive delivery. We can always quibble about the detail of how formulas work. But in the end, setting robust housing targets are the first step to planning to put more homes where they are needed. Where people will be. Where households are going to be formed. It’s easy to criticise statistics. Numbers can’t fight back. But behind all of those numbers are people. Young, old, and everywhere in between. People at every stage of life - united by one thing. They need a home. And they’re relying on our flailing system to provide one for them.
The Government tells us time and again that its priority is to deliver more affordable homes. So, what proportion of the overall 300,000 delivery target should be made of affordable homes in order to meet the needs of some of the most vulnerable in our society……… [tumbleweed]. Do we know how many affordable homes we should be delivering a year? We do not. Nada. Niente. Zip-a-dee-doo-da.
No planning skills strategy: Q146-150
We need more planners. Lots and lots and lots of them. The Government agrees with that, albeit it appears to have no idea how many we need. In 2020, the Government promised that it would “develop a comprehensive resources and skills strategy for the planning sector to support the implementation of our reforms”. Without that kind of strategy, it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the reform package looks like because there won’t be enough decent planners to implement anything.
Annnnnnyway. Here we are. 3 years on. Any skills strategy? Nope. Any promise that there will be a strategy within this Parliament? Nope. Deep sigh.
No idea how to replace the duty to cooperate: Q93-95.
The duty to cooperate, as we know, has been a disaster. That diagnosis is the easy bit. But, in a world where the Government has set its face against mandatory strategic cross-boundary planning, the hard bit is working out how to replace the duty to cooperate.
We now are getting a flavour of what Labour’s answer to this problem is - mandatory strategic cross-boundary plans. But this Government’s starter for 10 was something called an “alignment policy” which will “secure appropriate engagement between authorities where strategic planning considerations cut across boundaries”. Doesn’t that sound marvellous? Well, don’t get too excited. Because, it turns out, there’s a snag: the Department still has no idea what the alignment test will look like, and - we’re now told - is not even trying to achieve alignment in relation to housing numbers.
Giving up on the Green Belt: Q83.
As I explained here, one of the worst ideas this Government has had is the proposed insert to §142 of the draft NPPF that “Green Belt boundaries are not required to be reviewed and altered if this would be the only means of meeting the objectively assessed need for housing over the plan period”.
In many areas, this deeply depressing policy is a licence - in effect - to stop planning altogether. To down tools. Turn the lights off on your way out. Lichfields suggests this measure alone will be responsible for a loss of over 30,000 homes a year. And you know what’s interesting - as I said here, there seems to be more or less cross-industry consensus that it’s a really bad idea.
Against all of that, why oh why are the Government persisting? Well, so said Emran Mian, it’s because “where local authorities feel they have to do a green belt review it is very time consuming and it leads to a massive amount of local controversy”. Is there a neater encapsulation of why everything has gone so terribly wrong. I mean, heavens help us. Good planning is hard. It is time-consuming. It is resource intensive. It is invariably controversial. The answer is to maintain a sensible, predictable legal and policy framework that you don’t threaten to re-write every few weeks, and then give planners the skills, tools and resources to get on and do their work. The answer is not to just give up. Don’t bother reviewing Green Belt boundaries because it can be “controversial”? Urgh. As Barack Obama used to say: “Come on, man”.
No idea how the “bad behaviour” policy could actually work: Q105-Q110.
Having regard to an applicant’s “character” when deciding whether or not to grant them planning permission really is - for reasons I gave here - one of the most short-sighted, inane and insidious proposals for planning reform this Government has ever had. But it isn’t just silly. It’s impossibly unworkable. Because - to state the obvious - planning permission runs with land. The party that applies for the permission doesn’t have to be the party that develops the site.
This is such a basic problem with the idea of using planning applications to “punish” previous “bad behaviour”, that I’d assumed the Government would have dropped this rubbish by now. Well. They haven’t. But does the Minister have any idea at all how the policy could work in practice given that e.g. planning permissions can be… sold? Nope. Not a sausage. We await the consultation response. With bated breath.
Enjoy this glorious spring time, #planoraks. And this glut of May bank holidays. I hope your coronation BBQs turn out well. Stay well. And in the meantime, whatever else you do, through all the noise and nonsense, #keeponplanning.
