Notes from the High Street: welcome to “Class E”
What this week’s amendments to the Use Classes Order may mean for our high streets.
As Wendy Cope almost said, bloody planning laws are like bloody buses — you wait for about a year, and as soon as one approaches your stop, two or three others appear.
It’s been a bumper month already for #planoraks, and that’s even before we get the much-promised policy paper any day now which will tell us quite how radical the next few years might get.
But in the meantime, where on earth to start with this week’s news?
I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. Here’s my “hot take”: the new permitted development rights (important though they may become) pale into insignificance against the changes to the Use Class Order. In fact, those changes might really warrant being described as “radical”.
On the new permitted development rights to build up, have a look at Simon Ricketts’ brilliant summary here. Yesterday, we saw further amendements to the General Permitted Development Order which might just allow you to demolish a vacant office block and replace it with a block of flats. So long as you aren’t in a Conservation Area. And your office block was built pre-1989. And is under 1,000 square metres. And under 18 metres tall. And has been vacant for 6 months. And it’s permitted development, so the Local Planning Authority only retains limited control over your new scheme for a handful of important parameters, right? Wrong. Prior approval issues for our new Class ZA cover a long shopping list… transport, highways, contamination, flooding, design, external appearance, adequate natural light, impact on neighbours’ amenity, heritage, archeology, landscaping and even the impact of local business of losing commercial space. Approvals are hardly likely to be a slam dunk.
So what about the Use Classes Order?
As I say in this week’s pod-tastic episode of UnPlanned, there are […searches for a dipomatic word…] issues with our elderly friend the Use Classes Order. Particularly its arcane and anachronistic divisions between different kinds of retail and industrial uses (classes A and B) which - let’s be honest - have been struggling to keep up with our times for many moons now. They’re a time-capsule from another age (remember Euclid’s use classes of street car barns, wagon sheds and horseshoeing?). The Use Classes Order is a post-card from the 1980s, when traditional high streets were filled with traditional uses which often (but even then, not always) fell into pretty neat divisions.
But those rigid categories start to creak, don’t they, when you can go into your local mega-mart and under a single roof get your shopping (A1), sort out your banking or insurance (A2), have lunch in the cafe (A3) and - if you happen to work there too - retire to your office upstairs (B1a). Take a tool hire shop - bits of retail, some to members of the public, some to trade, some domestic items, other larger industrial activities happening… there have been scores of appeal decisions over several decades now trying to wrangle with exactly how to characterise this (you’d have thought) pretty basic mix of uses under the Use Classes Order. Those decisions reached contradictory views. And lots of inspectors end up falling back on “sui generis”, which is Latin for “I’ve no idea”.
But ours is a time of focus on creative co-location of business uses, shared and flexible spaces, pop-ups, concessions, clusters and the clever mixing up of complementary uses. Many of which defy easy categorisation. Of course, we’re also in a time when many parts of the High Street are struggling to survive. Surely, surely, you might be thinking, the day has come to free the high street from the shackles of the Use Classes Order and its anitiquated classifications.
Welcome to Class E. This one’s a game-changer. It really is. One of the most significant rollings back of regulatory control in the planning system for decades.
The nub of it is simple - a general “commercial, business and service” use class covering retail, food, financial services, gyms, healthcare, nurseries, offices and light industry. Movement between these (until now) different kinds of use will no longer need planning permission. Not because there’s some kind of deemed permitted right to change use, but because such a change (e.g. from shop to office to restaurant and back again) no longer constitutes development: see Art 3(1) UCO. No development = no need for planning permission.
So, some positives: Class E is a tool with enormous potential to help bring about the recovery of our high streets. It gives businesses an incredible amount of flexibility. Fewer worries about the legal niceties of distinctions between outdated use classes. And it brings the Use Classes Order chugging along into the 21st Century, which is a step forward.
But these positives come with huge risks: Local Planning Authorities and indeed local communities will lose any control over changes between these (sometimes very different) kinds of use, which give rise to different planning considerations. This is a drastic deregulatory step, and it removes at a stroke lots of important issues from the scope of the planning system. That will have massive implications for plan-making and strategies for development. As Simon Ricketts said here, beware the law of unintended consequences.
And here’s a bit of irony - remember all that chat about zoning? This is about as anti-zone-y a step as the Government could take. Class E’s purpose is to ditch over-rigid legalistic divisions between uses. But those rigid divisions are the building blocks of the US-style zoning we’ve been promised the Government may want to support. Well, only a few sleeps to go now before we find out. I’ll bet you can hardly wait!
In the meantime, stay well, #planoraks.
