Planning vs. politics - 3 big tests facing “Planning for the Future”
We’re getting the idea now, aren’t we? You’ve read the basics? E.g. my 3 minute summaries of:
The headlines in Planning for the Future;
Its big idea for a national housing plan; and
What those “growth areas” are all about.
You may even have glued yourself to the screen for a slightly longer explanation.
And people are starting to make their views known. Some of those people are Conservative MPs. And not all seems to be well. How can we tell? Because everyone’s talking about “algorithms” – one of the summer’s more politically toxic words.
What’s the commotion? Events, dear boy, events. As normal, it’s a spat about housing numbers, and how those numbers are distributed across the country. No small matter. Boris Johnson’s foreword to the White Paper is all about getting “the homes we need in the places we want to live at prices we can afford”. Really, this White Paper’s all about housing. Word count for minerals = 0. Waste = 1. Shops = 1. Housing = 100+. The national housing plans on offer are the foundation for everything else. For the zonal system to work, the automatic grants of planning permission, the sped-up / pared-down local plan process to get off the ground – for all of it to function – the housing numbers have to work first.
The prize is huge – (in theory, anyway) taking local politics out of housing numbers, streamlining local plan examinations and bringing some more certainty to development management. A more front-loaded, plan-led system, but one which retains discretion to make decisions which cut against the grain.
But the challenges of getting there are just as huge. Some of those challenges are political, and they’ve come to the fore in the last 2 or 3 weeks of headlines. And here are 3 big ones:
1. The South-East
It’s tale of 2 plans.
Here’s one from Lichfields which shows how the new standard method for calculating housing need compares to recent delivery:
And here’s one from Michael Legg which shows – at a high level – how the headline “constraints” are spread across the country:
See a problem?
The most concentrated area of growth (London and the South East) is also one of the most constrained areas, e.g. by the Metropolitan Green Belt, which on its own is larger than Trinidad and Tobago, and twice the size of Luxembourg.
Let’s take an example. Surrey. 11 local planning authorities, several of which would see their housing needs increase substantially under the proposed new standard method. For example, Elmbridge would go from an existing local plan requirement of 225 homes a year to 774, Waverly goes from 590 to 835, Epsom from 181 to 604, Tandridge from 125 to 533. Obviously, Surrey’s an easy train-ride into London. Which makes it a smart place to build houses to encourage sustainable travel patterns. So what’s the problem? Why is it so unaffordable? Why has delivery over the years been so restrained?
Well, here’s Surrey:
And this is what happens when you colour in the 3/4 of the county which Green Belt and then add in the Surrey Hills AONB:
Do you see the challenge?
Under the new regime, the green bits in that map get designated as “areas of protection”, which means - save in exceptional cases - no building there.
So here’s the political hot potato. In the White Paper world, who decides how we get from the figure for how many homes Surrey actually needs to how many homes it actually gets? The Ministry. How will they decide? We don’t know. But it’s going get very political. The shires want to “protect” the shires. Londoners want a “carve-out”. The good people of Gloucestershire are being told it’s all “errant nonsense”. In Worcestershire they’re calling it “madness”. You get the idea.
The consultation period isn’t even done yet, and Ministers are already promising a more “refined” formula (euphemism alert!). But new homes have to go somewhere. Don’t they? They can’t just go in politically expedient locations. Can they?
And as I’ve said before, the political behemoth that is the Green Belt is one of the only aspects of the current system which has managed to escape any tinkering at all in “Planning for the Future”. Our radical once-in-a-generation reforms weren’t quite radical enough to go there.
P.s. you may’ve spotted another problem on the Lichfields plan above - all of those areas in the North, and in particular the North-East - where the housing targets proposed are lower than recent rates of delivery. How that fits with the “levelling up” agenda (it doesn’t) is something Lichfields discuss here.
2. The blame game
Last week, the Minister set out to quiet the unease over these large housing numbers in the shires. He said:
“So it is important to stress the standard method is only the first step in the current local plan process – the numbers generated for an area’s housing need will not necessarily be the same as their ultimate targets.
That’s because councils will take into account various constraints in their areas, including protecting their Green Belt and environmentally significant sites. Nor does it dictate where those homes should go. Both are important aspects of the system which rest with local councillors to determine.
It was a Conservative government that got rid of top-down regional planning targets, and introduced a-locally led system, which takes account of local need and local constraints. Localism requires local decision-making – and our system puts councillors at the forefront of those decisions.
Our longer term planning reforms, set out in the Planning for the Future paper, are an opportunity for us to embrace a planning system which puts councillors and communities in the driving seat of designing their neighbourhoods and puts creating beautiful places that communities can be proud of at its heart.”
Well. That might just about work as an explanation of the current system. But it definitely doesn’t capture the system painted by “Planning for the Future” which, as I’ve explained, hoovers back up of responsibility for setting and distributing housing numbers across the country back to the good folks at Number 2, Marsham Street.
The “locally-led” system the Minister is relying on to get out of this particular political log-jam is the very system his White Paper proposes to get rid of. If he’s against “top-down” housing targets, well… imagine what he’ll say once he’s read “Planning for the Future”.
One thing this mini-episode shows is how difficult and controversial setting binding housing targets is actually going to be for the Ministry. Over the past decade or so, when the need arose, central government could scapegoat local authorities (sometimes - but not always - fairly) for not stepping up to the challenge of grappling properly with housing need. But the nature of the blame-game shifts when those housing needs are centrally imposed.
3. Consents vs. delivery
In the end, if the scheme sketched out by the White Paper comes forward, it will be judged on its results. One of the key metrics the White Papers tees up for that assessment is whether the delivery of homes in England goes up or down. But there’s a political risk in pointing the finger too strongly in the direction of the planning system as the one-and-only obstacle to getting England building (which is the thrust of §1.3 - §1.4 of the White Paper). Because, in broad brush-strokes:
9 in 10 planning applications are already approved;
Consents already exist for several hundred thousand homes which haven’t been built yet;
In June 2018 – June 2019, 377k full residential consents were granted;
But, of course, those consents don’t translate directly to delivery, which was at around 214k last year. That is for all kinds of reasons, some of which were covered in the Letwin review of build out rates in 2018.
The planning system is - of course - a very important part of the equation of meeting our need for new homes. But it’s only part of the problem. Which means it can only be part of the solution.
An awful lot to chew on. If you’re interested in how these new-fangled “permissions in principle” might work out - a very important plank of the White Paper proposals - do join me and the good folks at Town Legal next Tuesday evening. In the meantime, I hope your consultation responses are coming along nicely, and stay well #planoraks!
