#PlanningReformDay 2024 - “a war on Britain’s planning system”?
A new dawn has broken, has it not? Ah yes, It’s all go in the #plan-i-verse this week. We’re back on the front pages (right there next to a sadly unsuccessful Emma Raducanu), and apparently… well it’s bad news: planning is both being “ripped up” and the subject of a “declaration of war” by our new Chancellor. Eek.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?!? 🤯
Monday 8th July 2024 was the 1st proper working day of the new Labour Government. A normal Monday morning for me starts around 6am with my 2 year old screaming “dadddyyyy, come ‘ereeeeee, ‘urrry uuuuuup” at me through her baby monitor.
But Monday 8th July was not a normal Monday. It began even earlier than that. I hustled over to the Today Program to give Amol Rajan a low-down on what appeared to be coming in the, it would seem, almost-entirely-not-listened-to 6.50am slot:
The full interview is here if you have 4 whole minutes to spare.
And later that day… it all kicked off:
Front pages banging on about planning all over the place (see above!). My favourite was the Daily Mail - perhaps juuuust a touch hysterically [Surely not!, Ed.] - claiming that Rachel Reeves was “declaring war on Britain’s planning system”.
Rachel Reeves, our first ever female chancellor, made a speech: here. Obvs, this is the key bit! And you’ve probably already seen summaries of what she said galore. You’re about to get another one. In the Times, Morten Morland summarised the position like this:
The department - or, should I say, Ministry has a new name: here. (Aka MoHoCoLoGo). So long, “levelling up” - we hardly knew ye. And, in addition to Angela Rayner who is our new Secretary of State, we now know our Ministers - Matt Pennycook MP (who has, as you will all know, been the shadow housing minster since 2021 so knows a thing or two about this gig already), Jim McMahon MP along with parliamentary under-secretaries including Lord Khan of Burnley, Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (a solid New Town heritage, there!) Rushanara Ali MP, and Alex Norris MP.
The new Labour government reversed the long-standing de facto embargo on on-shore wind schemes: here. It’s enough to make your head spin. Since 2015, the approval of wind energy has been contingent on the developer achieving - and being able to demonstrate - “community support”. This was part of David Cameron’s push back on so-called “green crap”. Developers can almost never meet this bar about community support (at least not from the community immediately local to wherever the wind turbines are to go). Some tried paying people for local support - that turned out to be unlawful. The number of planning consents for on-shore wind plummeted precipitously to nigh-on zero for a decade or so. And… as Tommy Cooper used to say… just like that. Embargo reversed. National policy… just… reversed. And there we have it. Onshore wind development in England. Game on.
Cue Linkedin posts, blog posts, news articles galore…
So. Broadly, what has Rachel Reeves actually said. Are we… at war?
Nope. Stand down, friends. Most of what’s on the table, at least for now, are reasonably modest tweaks to the system we already have. There’s big stuff coming - so we’re told - see e.g. my post last week about New Towns - but the big stuff isn’t here yet. To cut through it, we’re promised:
A new NPPF out for consultation this month - the idea is to adopt it within the 1st 100 days, i.e. by mid-October 2024.
Updates to National Policy Statements on infrastructure “within the year”.
“Restoring of mandatory housing targets” - aka the Theresa May 2018 local housing need system under which, as we know, housing targets were never actually mandatory to begin with.
Onshore wind is back in business - covered that bit already.
A new taskforce to “accelerate stalled housing sites”.
300 new planning officers - an important start, but even if they can be found, that’s fewer than 1 new officer per authority, and would replace less than a tenth of the 3,100 planners who left public service between 2010 and 2020. Although maybe the prospect of a 4 day week will lure some of them back!
More direct intervention.
A letter coming from Angela Rayner, our new deputy PM and Secretary of State for MoHoCoLoGo which tells authorities to (a) get on and adopt local plans, (b) review their Green Belt boundaries (thereby reversing last year’s official award-winning worst planning policy of the year).
What do we not yet know? Lots and lots of things:
Nothing yet on new towns - how many, where, when, how etc - or strategic planning, or national development management policies, or plan-making in general or whatever. All of that, we infer, is to come.
We don’t know what the revised NPPF is going to look like yet (albeit we won’t have to wait long!). So on things like e.g. the definition of “grey belt”, or what a “bolstered” presumption in favour of sustainable development may look like… watch this space.
So, I fear most of this week’s reviews are a bit premature. Including this one. We’ll have to await the new NPPF, and what follows after it. But if you want a quick hit:
The speed with which Labour’s begun to take action is remarkable, and it is - at least to this tired soul - heartening both that planning has taken centre stage on the 1st working day of the new government, and also that the person giving the speech is the Chancellor herself. That tells us something about how important Labour sees planning reform in the Government’s wider program for economic growth.
The wind farm policy statement is loooong, loooong overdue and is unequivocally a Good Thing. It also, for the true nerds, is a good example of changes to the NPPF happening without any public consultation.
Most of the other things - including the headline grabbing so-called “mandatory” (aka non-mandatory) housing targets - are really about taking us back to earlier versions of the system from the pre-December 2023 version of the NPPF which I talked about here. Just goes to show, really, quite how much can be done without changes to legislation. Policy is power!
In the end: this is a start. A good start. A quick start. And, as we all know, speed really is critical. But it’s still only a start. And if the Daily Mail thinks this stuff is controversial, well… you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait until we get to announcements on where the New Towns are going to go! That’ll be a headline I’d like to see.
Stay well, #planoraks. Watch this space. To those of you who will be watching tonight, COME ON ENGLAND. Don’t go away - I suspect there’ll be some things for us to discuss later this month when we get a new NPPF to read through together. These are heady days for people like us. In the meantime, deep breaths, heads down, and do your level best to #keeponplanning.
