Notes from the hustings: the end of “Stalinist housing targets”?
I think the problems we’re going to face in the new century are beyond the wisdom of Solomon, let alone me. But I think the right place to start is to say:
“Fair is fair. This is who we are. These are our numbers.”
- The West Wing, S1E6, “Mr Willis of Ohio”.
You lucky devils. What a time to be alive. I mean. You’re spoiled for choice (so long as you’re in the 0.3% of the electorate who’s kept up your monthly Tory subscriptions). Liz or Rishi? Rishi or Liz? An embarrassment of riches.
That said, they do seem to disagree a lot, don’t they? About lots of the fundamentals of our economy. But worry not, because there’s at least one thing they’re thick as thieves on: planning. And what’s the headline? Repeat it with me:
“No more Stalinist housing targets.”
Truss went there first: here. And quicker than you can say “Ready for Rishi”, Sunak was right in behind: here.
Sigh.
Are you feeling weary, #planoraks? Is it the heat? Or is it that we’ve been through this before. In 2010, then-Secretary of State Eric Pickles decided to wipe away regional strategies because:
“Top-down targets from regional quangos and bureaucrats” aka “failed Soviet tractor style top-down planning targets” were a “terrible, expensive, time-consuming way to impose house building and worst of all threatened the destruction of the green belt”
All of which amounted to “a national disaster that robbed local people of their democratic voice, alienating them and entrenching opposition against new development”.
Then-”Decentralisation Minster” Greg Clark (now back in town as our Secretary of State at DHLUC) added “regional edicts, which allowed communities no say, injected poison into the planning system which stymied development.”
So hang on. If we’re over a decade since the Localism Act returned “power to the people” and ditched that “Soviet tractor style top-down planning”, what exactly are Liz and Rishi promising to ditch now?
For the chop this time - so we’re told - is the Government’s policy on “local housing need” which was introduced through the 2018 NPPF by that notorious Communist, Theresa May. We’ve been over this before - long-time readers will remember the “mutant algorithm” wars of 2020 (which may also have been one of the Stars Wars prequels?) which gave rise to that year’s much-anticipated Planorak award for “U-turn of the year” here.
But just to re-cap in case you’re new to this - what are we discussing? The offending policy is a standard formula to calculate local housing need for each planning authority. It’s an idea which evolved from the 2016 Local Plans Expert Group report here. Its central purpose: to make local plan-making easier. Which, you might’ve thought, is something our new PM would want to support. Because, as LPEG reported at the time, local authorities working out their own housing needs in their own ways became the greatest single cause of delay to plans being made. And the greatest challenge to their adoption.
So how does this shady Whitehall scam-job work exactly? This may disappoint you. Because it isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even an algorithm, still less a mutant one. Here it goes… are you sitting comfortably:
You start with household growth projections (because more people need more homes).
You adjust for affordability (because greater housing unaffordability should be corrected by greater supply).
You may need to apply a cap to stop the number looking too big (there’s no logical basis for doing this, as LPEG itself pointed out here - but guidance is guidance, and this was thought by the Government of the day make the standard method more politically palatable for local authorities faced with step-changes in delivery).
You now also add an uplift for the top 20 urban centres - that itself was introduced as a sop to Tory backbenchers in the home counties (see, again, here).
And after that, you end up with a number.
Are authorities required to plan to meet that number? Stalin-style?
Nope.
Meeting the number isn’t mandatory. The formula gives authorities a starting point to work out how many homes they need, but not an end point. That is because it doesn’t account for policies e.g. growth strategies, or constraints to new development, like the Green Belt, National Parks or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty where new building is restricted. So authorities can – and regularly do – plan to under-shoot their need figure by hundreds or thousands of homes.
Let’s get real, folks. Is there anything even vaguely Stalinist about any of that?
Course not.
So what on earth is going on?
It’s a depressing chapter of the same old political to and fro I’ve been moaning about a lot recently. The elected members in many districts - in particular those nestled in the Tory heartlands of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent and Surrey, but obviously there are many others and they certainly are not all Tories - have set themselves against planning to provide the houses they need to meet their projected growth in population. Because housing is the kind of thing they may support in general, but never in particular. It’s a story readers of these pages will be sick of hearing. A story about resistance to plan-making. It’s a story (isn’t it always) about over-the-top reverence for, politicisation and misunderstanding of the Green Belt. It’s a story about the stagnation of strategic planning across the land: the Greater Manchester spatial framework dead, the Ox-Cam Arc dead, then just the other day, the Oxfordshire plan dead. A casualty of - you guessed it - squabbles about housing numbers and the Green Belt. Time after time after time.
Liz and Rishi are playing to their audience of Conservative members. Of course they are. That’s politics. But, politics aside, are they right? Are the local housing need numbers Stalinist? Of course not. Should we ditch them and leave the job of deriving housing need numbers to individual local planning authorities? Of course not. That would be disastrous. And that isn’t speculation. We know it because we tried it from 2011 and it went so terribly that we had to invent the local housing need formula a few years later. After all of that, going back to the future and ditching the policy on local housing need is (literally) the opposite of what a sane Government would be doing - it would re-inject cost, uncertainty and massive delays into a system which already has far too much of those things. More appeals. More postponed and failed plans. Fewer homes. Heavens help us.
But there’s a deeper point than that. To start, as Julie Andrews told us, at the very beginning: the basic function of a planning system is to… plan. For the new homes and jobs and shops and roads and railways and everything else that our growing population requires.
And sure, we can always quibble about the detail of how formulas work. But in the end, the local housing need policy is designed to allow us to plan to put more houses 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.
Faced with all of that responsibility, it seems to me that the very least the planning system can do is to acknowledge these people. To recognise them. To give their needs some weight. And it may all seem horribly technocratic, but that job… that all-important task… it begins with a number.
Like Mr Willis of Ohio said in the West Wing, the right place to start is to say “Fair is fair. This is who we are. These are our numbers.” The whole merry dance of town and country planning - it all begins with a number. Who are we? What our our numbers? What are our needs?
Now, once you have a number, the hard bit starts. You may then decide to plan to meet the needs. Or not. But even the most basic exercise of town planning should start by understanding what those needs are. If we aren’t doing that, then what are we doing? You can call the number “Stalinist” if it wins you votes. But the number represents people who are in need, and those needs are going to exist whether they’re politically palatable to you or not. And in the end, if we don’t even know the scale of the needs our system should be planning to meet, then we’re just dancing in the dark.
Which is, of course, Liz’s campaign song.
I hope you’re enjoying your summers, #planoraks, and haven’t melted away in this blessed heat. Don’t despair. We’ll be into Autumn before you know it - falling leaves, gloves and scarves, hot chocolates. Proper weather. It isn’t easy with all the noise. But do your level best. To #keeponplanning. And if it helps, spend a few moments with the Boss.
