#PlanningReformDay 2024 - what just happened?
You remember. Every time - every time - Labour MPs came under fire during this summer’s election campaign… each time those frowning journos said “that’s all very well, but where will this “growth” you keep banging on about actually come from?”… the same response was volleyed back. We all heard it. “Planning reform”. That was the company line: “well, Mishal/Amol/Laura/Chris/Nick/whoever-you-are, as you know, we’ve promised to take the brakes off the planning system and to deliver 1.5 million homes".
Riiiight. But what does “taking the brakes off” really mean? The King’s Speech (as ever) was short on detail. You can’t blame the King for that, to be fair. He didn’t write the thing, and Charles is having his own issues with the planning system this year. So… in the meantime, #planoraks up and down the land have been waiting. Patiently. To move beyond the hyperbolic headlines, of which there have been many. To arrive, finally, at something with a bit of detail.
Yesterday, folks. Yesterday. At long last. Yesterday… some detail finally came.
Let’s be honest. It was a big day. One of the biggest days for #planoraks of all stripes in (I think) many years. Change is coming. We have a lot to cover. It’s going to take months of blog posts 😬. But just for today, to set the ball rolling: if you could give me your attention for, say, 5 more minutes? And we can touch on the big things. Just the biggies. Right. Sitting comfortably? Off we go:
Let’s start with some hyperlinks. Yesterday lunch-time our new Deputy PM and MoHoLoCoGo chief Angela Rayner MP made a statement to the House of Commons which can be watched here introducing a new consultation on national planning policy. In short order we were given:
A written ministerial statement which covers (and expands on) the things the Secretary of State said in the chamber: here. You should read that! Not least beacuse it is capable of being a material consideration in planning decisions right now - see the Cala Homes case from 2011.
A press release here, and a news story from the Ministry here.
And then, at last… the consultation itself here, including…
A tracked changes version of the new NPPF here.
Consultation text to explain the changes, and point toward yet further changes here.
Outcomes of how the new revised method for calculating local housing need would change targets in every local planning authority here.
A letter to planning authorities from Angela Rayner summarising some of what’s coming here.
And then just this morning… news on the New Towns taskforce to be headed up by Sir Michael Lyons and Dame Kate Barker. They have 12 months to recommend locations for “largescale communities of at least 10,000 new homes each, with many significantly larger”.
Still with me? Here are the basics:
Dates: The consultation runs from now until 24th September 2024. Previous promises to adopt a new NPPF by mid-October seem ambitious given what will probably be tens of thousands of consultation responses to review. Still. The Government say they’ll publish it “before the end of the year”.
Questions: There are no fewer than 106 questions for consultees to answer [106… a coincidence? Ed.] including on things which go far beyond what is covered in the new NPPF. 106. 😬. 🤯. That is, as Cilla Black used to say, a lorra lorra questions (do you get the sense that Labour just may have started thinking about this a bit before the general election?). It’s particularly a lot for us to answer over the summer hols. But, it seems to me, some of the issues at stake in this consultation are big. Really big. I’ll get onto them in a mo. So. If you take nothing else from this blog post, take this: please please please try to find some time in your lives between now and 24th September 2024 to respond to these questions. A link to the responding web-page is here. Have at it!
Transitioning: Assuming a new NPPF is adopted this year, when would its provisions actually bite?
For decision-making, straight away post-adoption.
For plan-making, it’s more involved. To give you a brief summary (look at the first Annex to the draft NPPF for the detail)::
From 1 month post-publication, all plans which set out new housing requirements will need to follow the new NPPF unless (a) the plan has been submitted for examination already, or (b) it’s reached a Regulation 19 consultation, but the housing requirement is less 200 homes a year or less below the new local housing need figure. Otherwise, the new NPPF applies along with bolstered housing targets. More of that in a moment. If (a) above applies, and the submitted plan has a housing requirement more than 200 homes a year below local housing need, an immediate review will be required after the plan is adopted.
Scope: What’s not in the new NPPF? Lots. Including:
National development management policies (albeit they’re still promised for the future).
New towns (which I wrote about the other day here) - details all still TBD, but as I say above we have the taskforce. Who have a lot to do within the next year!
Only limited detail of the new tier of mandatory strategic planning (again, further legislation is required and promised, including mayors preparing “Spatial Development Strategies” for their areas, but NB for now we still have the much-maligned duty to cooperate).
A further revised NPPF which will have to go along with the new plan-making system in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act which the Government tells us it intends to bring in from summer-autumn 2025, with a requirement to submit any “old-school” local plans under the current Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 system by no later than December 2026 (that’s a chunky extension from the previous June 2025 deadline).
NB as part of bringing in the Levelling Up and Regelation Act, the Government is pressing ahead with implementing the new section 73B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 which as I said here will be a really positive step that is going to make many of our lives a whole lot easier.
And scant more info as yet on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill trailed in the King’s Speech, other than we have a bit more of a sense of what “modernising” planning Committees actually means - it means “introducing a national scheme of delegation that focuses their efforts on the applications that really matter, and places more trust in skilled professional planners to do the rest” and “avoids a potential development being reviewed multiple times even where it’s been included in the local plan”. Well well well. Planning by professionals! We’ll see what members think about all of that.
A “long term plan for housing”, which will include an “affordable housing revolution” - but we haven’t got the detail of that yet (e.g. look out for right to buy reforms, and funding promises in the next spending review).
Anyway, let’s get into it. What is on offer? I know we’re on the clock. I offered you a 5 minute read. So I’m going to try to give you 10 headlines. Will they be comprehensive. No siree. Will there definitely be only 10 of them. Mmm… no promises. But at least you’ll leave this blog post armed with some talking points:
(1) Housing numbers: For starters, the indefensible December 2023 changes are all reversed, so we’re talking (i) no more immunity from 5 year housing land supply challenges for authorities with recently adopted local plans, (ii) no more 4 year housing land supply [you mean… you mean all those blogs… were for nothing? 😢 Ed.], (iii) re-introduction of a 5% buffer.
But the biggest change on housing numbers isn’t in the NPPF at all. It’s the proposed shift to the way that local housing need is calculated. Do you remember every planner’s favourite Star Wars prequel, the mutant algorithm wars? Well, folks. That’s where we’re headed again. Albeit this time we’re headed there with a considerably weakened rebel alliance.
To recap: at the moment, the basis for “local housing need” is the 2014 household projections. Which is bolstered for affordability (albeit subject to an arbirtrary cap to protect the least affordable areas from having to meet their needs). To that you add, among other things, an artificial, never-yet-evidenced “urban uplift” which Robert Jenrick introduced in the heat of previous mutant algorithm wars to keep the numbers away from the shires. That approach gets us up to an overall target of around 306,000 new homes a year nationally additional homes per annum, of which around 99,000 are to come from London (albeit in real life it’s been a recipe to fail, not least because London’s delivery is nowhere near even half that much, and because permissions for just over 300,000 homes are never going to deliver 300,000+ actual new homes for reasons e.g. that Lichfields explained here).
So. Yesterday’s proposal is to drop that method completely. And to replace it with a “stock-based” approach. In other words: you start with how many houses exist in your area at the moment. You aim to increase that level every year by… 0.8%. You increase further still in areas which where house prices are more than four times higher than earnings, i.e. to account for unaffordability. Overall, this new approach adds up to around 372,000 new homes a year, of which 81,000 are in London.
Broad-brush then: overall numbers go up pretty considerably (albeit by closer to 25% than the 50% reported in last week’s paper). London’s target comes down by almost a fifth (albeit, again, almost double above what London has actually delivered in any year in the last 20 years+). But every other region in the country has its housing targets boosted. And that means that the vast majority of local planning authorities - some 90% - are going to see an increase in their local housing need numbers, and over 2/3 of authorities will see their number go up by over 200 homes a year: see this very helpful (and amazingly swift) analysis from Lichfields here. An analysis which concludes that these considerable bumps in housing targets may get us to 300,000 homes a year by the end of the first 5 years of a Labour government (which would mean building to level we haven’t reached in decades), but will not be enough to achieve 1.5 million homes over that period.
To the many who say that ramped up housing targets aren’t enough on their own to achieve ramped up completions, you’re right. On the other hand, we need more planning permissions. Lots of them. Obviously, the Government aren’t only relying on changing these housing numbers to boost completions. But measures to (drastically) bolster the number of consents delivered for housing development and other kinds of development are a necessary, and critical pre-condition of bolstering completions. And in any event, more consents will lead to more completions. There’s a long-standing (and unsurprising) correlation in the trend-lines for permissions and completions, see e.g. from the Competition Markets Authority, albeit the graph doesn’t include the most recent monitoring years you can see here when those lines have reached 20+ year lows:
(2) Plan-making: Another reversal from December 2023. The local housing need number isn’t just a starter-for-10 any more for local authorities designing their plans. It’s now the only benchmark against which national policy allows strategic policies in local plans to be drawn up. No more “advisory starting point”. No more arguments about “exceptional circumstances” for undercutting local housing need. To that extent, and in that way, local housing need would now be “mandatory”.
But. On the other hand, that doesn’t really mean the actual housing requirement number in a local plan always reflects local housing need in full. It’s possible in this new world, just as it is now, and as it has been before, for authorities to decide to plan not to meet their needs. So the need targets are not “mandatory” in that sense - they don’t fix the final housing requirement in the local plan. Constrained districts may be able to justify lower housing delivery against those targets in their plans, but only if they can show the Planning Inspector that they have - in the language of the consultation - “taken all possible steps, including optimising density, sharing need with neighbouring authorities, and reviewing Green Belt boundaries, before a lower housing requirement will be considered”. On the Green Belt boundaries bit of that equation, see (4) below.
(3) Previously developed land: Development within settlements to meet needs for homes and other things on brownfield land should now be regarded as acceptable in principle (in additional to getting substantial positive weight in their favour, which they already have). Nothing new with a focus on brownfield land, of course, but a helpful step in the right direction.
(4) Green Belt: Another reversal to the December 2023 NPPF changes: if planning authorities cannot meet their needs e.g. for housing without using Green Belt land, the new NPPF will require them to review those boundaries and proposes alterations to meet local housing need in full unless “the review provides clear evidence that such alterations would fundamentally undermine the function of the Green Belt across the area of the plan as a whole”.
In real life, this will make it much, much harder for authorities to rely on Green Belt constraints to avoid meeting their full local housing needs in their local plans. Exceptional circumstances are still required to justify changing those boundaries - same as now - but those exceptional circumstances now expressly include “instances where an authority cannot meet its identified need for housing, commercial or other development through other means”.
This is real change. It goes further than merely peeling back the December 2023 NPPF, which was awful on this point for the reasons I explained here. It could be, it should be the beginning of the drawbridge being lowered again across many of the least affordable places in England. Places which have most consistently and successfully resisted development for half a century.
(5) Grey Belt: Another biggie. So. When plans are considering green belt release (on which see above), they have to turn first to brownfield land (nothing new there), and then after that to a new creature known as “grey belt”, and only once that lot’s exhausted onto other non-brown non-grey greenfield green belt land [why the obsession with colours? Ed.].
What is grey belt? The proposed definition is:
The 5 Green Belt purposes are unchanged from what we have now - you can see them here. That reference to “footnote 7” areas is to the stuff listed here, e.g. National Parks, National Landscapes and protected habitats sites. NB the consultation text takes the definition further, suggesting that grey belt land which makes a “limited contribution” to the green belt purposes would
So if you have a greenfield site in the green belt, and it’s not washed over by any “footnote 7” designations, if it doesn’t make more than a limited contribution to green belt purposes, well… that site could be “grey belt” (whether or not land actually is grey belt will, I fear, be the topic of quite many a planning inspector’s decision over the next year or two).
If it is “grey belt”, so what? Well, as above, it would then need to be turned to first after brownfield land to consider its development potential when a local plan’s green belt boundaries are being reviewed (which they’ll have to be more often now - see above). But it would also mean something else. Something potentially very powerful…
You’ll remember e.g. from cases like this that to support most kinds of housing development on greenfield sites in the green belt at the moment the NPPF requires the scheme’s benefits clearly to outweigh its harms, including harm to the green belt, so as to constitute “very special circumstances”. That’s the high policy bar which has meant, at least until recent years, successful planning applications in the green belt for e.g. housing have been relatively few and far between. That policy test hasn’t substantively changed since national green belt policy came along in 1955. So - here’s the news. If your site is “grey belt” , all of that could change.
For “grey belt” sites, you do not need to meet that “very special circumstances” policy bar at all so long as (a) your site is “sustainable”, (b) it wouldn’t “fundamentally undermine the function of the Green Belt across the area of the plan as a whole” (which it normally won’t), (c) the Council has a less than 5 year housing land supply (which lots of green belt authorities don’t and, remember, there’ll be more housing land supply shortfalls than ever before - see above) or sub-75% housing delivery test or there is a “demonstrable need for land to be released for development of local, regional or national importance”, and (d) so long as any housing schemes meet the “golden rules” at §155 of the draft NPPF, i.e. include at least 50% affordable hosing along with necessary infrastructure improvements and public open space.
This change could, at a stroke, open up for possible development right now (i.e. years ahead of potential local plan allocations) many hundreds of edge-of-settlement sites washed over by antiquated green belt designations all over the country. What is, if I might venture an opinion here, so pleasing about the policy proposal is that it focusses right in on protecting what the green belt is actually for (i.e. its purposes). And not what everyone always thinks it’s for (i.e. its greenness). I’ve been saying for years that we need to talk about England’s green belt. Well, can you believe it. Praise be. At long last. We actually are.
(6) First homes (which I talked about here): no more requirement for 25%+ of affordable housing to be first homes.
(7) “Beauty” (which I talked about here and here): gone. Replaced with good design. A real step forward.
(8) Presumption in favour of sustainable development: the much-litigated-over paragraph 11(d) of the NPPF gets a wording tweak. Now, the “tilted balance” can be engaged if “policies for the supply of land” (rather than the “most important” policies) are “out-of-date”. Policies for the supply of land are defined as those policies “which set an overall requirement and/or make allocations and allowances for windfall sites for the area and type of development concerned”. I don’t expect this to make too much of a difference, but maybe don’t listen to me because last time the NPPF had a policy like this in it about policies “for the supply of housing”, that proved so controversial that we had to go all the way up to the Supreme Court to argue about what it meant: here.
(9) Infrastructure Levy: gone. 🍾.
(10) Renewable energy: I said the other day that July 2024 has been, for my money, the best time ever to have a planning application in before the UK Government for major renewable energy development in England. Well. Things continue to look up for renewables. Big time. The support for renewables in the new NPPF is no longer qualified e.g. by the caveats that its impacts have to be made acceptable, or that the developer has to achieve “community support”. No more de facto embargo. Instead, we’re told that “Local planning authorities should support planning applications for all forms of renewable and low carbon development”. Full. Stop. Need should be assumed. Significant weight should be given to schemes’ contribution toward renewable energy generation a “net zero future”. In addition, the Government is proposing to raise the NSIP thresholds both for solar (to 150MW) and onshore wind (to 100MW). Which would mean lots more proposals for renewables coming through the now town and country planning system (rather than the DCO process under the Planning Act 2008) which has ironically become both a quicker and cheaper route.
(11) Highways: I know I said only 10 points! Come on! My “one more thing” is the change to test to refuse applications on highways grounds. The bar for refusal on that basis has always been high, i.e. “if there would be an unacceptable impact on highway safety, or the residual cumulative impacts on the road network would be severe”. Now, after the word “severe”, the Government adds “in all tested scenarios”. Which is aimed, so the consultation explains, at “challenging the default assumption of automatic traffic growth, where places are designed for a ‘worst case’ peak hour scenario, can drive better outcomes for residents and the environment”. The language could be clearer. It may be there are debates about what this means. So I’ll tell you what I think it means. I read that as making a high bar to refuse permission on this kind of highways basis even higher, i.e. because even if there were severe impacts in 1 or more worst-case scenarios (e.g. at particular times, or in accordance with particular assumptions), that wouldn’t justify refusal unless there are severe impacts in all tested scenarios. A big change, which many who we are worried about the vices of designing new places defensively around worst-case highways assumptions will welcome.
(12) Flood risk: Number 12?!?!?! You said 10. OK - I’ll be quick. We have some big problems with national policy and guidance on flood risk: see here. Nothing’s yet proposed to sort this out. On the other hand, the door is open for comments - even if those comments end up shaping future national development management policies, rather than this new NPPF. The consultation says that “We have heard that aspects of current planning policy for flood risk could be clearer or more proportionate, and so would welcome views on potential improvements.” Question 80 is “Are any changes needed to policy for managing flood risk to improve its effectiveness?”. Well. Yes there are. Here’s one: don’t require a flood risk sequential test, at least in respect of surface water and other kinds of non-fluvial flood risk, if a scheme’s drainage and flood risk mitigation strategy effectively manages any flood risk.
So. There are 12 quick hits. Will all of this work? Heavens knows. This NPPF will, in the end, be only one piece - and an early piece - in a much more complicated policy and statutory puzzle over the coming years which includes e.g. new towns, strategic planning and other things.
Still. I think we can say this for now:
We’ve had some moments in the last few years where NPPF consultations have really made you wonder what it’s all for. This - thank goodness - is not one of those moments. To these tired eyes, it’s so refreshing, so deeply refreshing, so unfamiliar too, to read a national policy proposal not borne out of a defensive political crouch. Not just a ploy to keep the Theresa Villers brain trust at bay. Not just treading water. But a policy, a proper policy, that comes with a vision, that comes from a clear and unapologetic desire to make absolutely enormous change. Urgh. A vision. We haven’t had that for a while. No, sir. Say what you like about this consultation - and folks will be saying a great deal for the next 8 weeks. But these proposed changes are serious. They’re thorough. They’re deeply considered. The overall ambitions for delivery remain (very) lofty. So lofty we may not get there, at least in the first parliamentary term of a Labour Government. But, heck. Maybe now’s a time for some lofty ambitions. And you know what, whisper it quietly… some of this stuff… it might actually work. Not on its own. Not without more. Not without time, money, resourcing, skills, effort… but imagine, if you even can. A functioning system. What on earth would planning bloggers have to write about then?
Deep breaths, #planoraks. More to come over the next 2 months on this on topics we haven’t even touched on above. But for now: enjoy the sunshine, sharpen those consultation pencils… you’ve got some questions that need answering. 106 of them, to be specific. Stay well, and whatever else you do, try your darnedest to #keeponplanning.
