Planning in a pickle

Planning
The government is turning planning upside down, with proposals which seem at once to both promote localism and disregard it. Peter Stewart picks over the announcements so far

A lot has happened since my last article.  We have a new government which plans significant changes to the planning system.  The coalition’s proposals for reform, set out in its Programme for government, are much as stated by the Tories before the election in Open Source Planning. There is little sign of Lib Dem input.

Eric Pickles, the new secretary of state for communities, has already announced abolition of both Regional Spatial Strategies (RSSs), which set out local housing numbers and minimum housing density targets. The resulting policy hiatus has disrupted local authorities’ work on their core strategies, and muddied consideration of projects in the pipeline. 
Ministers are quoted as having looked with ‘frustration and despair’ at ‘bureaucracy jamming up the system’ that they now plan to sort out. That frustration is one most architects would share, and a driver for reform that they would support.  But the government’s first big change to the system has been widely criticised as likely to slow down the delivery of housing, at least in the short term. Developers dislike uncertainty above all, and the current lack of clarity seems likely to paralyse decision making.

The secretary of state has also issued an amendment to PPS3 which is claimed (in stridently populist tones) to herald the ‘end of garden grabbing’, by taking gardens out of the definition of ‘previously developed land’.  The practical consequences of this change of policy may however be rather less than has been claimed; a note on the subject can be found on the Planning Group page of the RIBA website (http://tiny.cc/4fqwj).

Ministers have also made clear statements of an intention to maintain the green belt and prevent ‘concreting over the countryside’.  So there won’t be building on fields or in gardens, or anywhere where local people don’t want it.  But the government also wants to increase housing delivery overall.  Something will have to give – but what is not yet clear.  Ministers continue to talk, as they did in opposition, of addressing this by incentivising local councils, who will get to keep Council Tax receipts for new homes that they permit – for a few years.  So far this does not seem to have impressed many.

With many of these promises, the devil will be in the detail.  It is not at all clear how the tensions that are already apparent will be resolved. And some sweeping statements are far from clear – a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’, for example.  We will find out more when the Decentralisation and Localism bill is published later this year.  It will set out a range of proposals for planning and related legislation.  It is set to ‘devolve greater powers to councils and neighbourhoods’ and ‘give local communities control over housing and planning decisions’ (in England and Wales).

The government says the bill will empower local people, free local government from central and regional control, give local communities a real share in local growth, and produce a more efficient and more local planning system.

Its main elements will be to abolish RSSs, return decision-making powers on housing and planning to local councils, abolish the Infrastructure Planning Commission (although this will be replaced with something similar), replace Regional Development Agencies with Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), and allow for the creation of trusts to make it simpler for communities to provide homes for local people.

The LEPs will be joint local authority-business bodies that promote local economic development, while the home-building trusts will benefit from a ‘community right to build’, which will allow community groups to bypass planning consent if there is ‘overwhelming community support’.

The essence of the proposals is ‘localism’.  Eric Pickles has said that ‘by giving up central control we will put democratic accountability back into the local economy, making it responsive to the needs of local business and local people.’  This begs some big questions, as developers are no doubt pointing out to Mr Pickles. ‘Business’ (interestingly placed before ‘people’ in the above statement) is generally what builds things these days, but isn’t a beneficiary of democratic accountability; and many of the businesses that want to build things are not local.  Yet it is clear that the government wants to ‘rebalance’ the economy towards the private sector.  The LEPs appear to be the mechanism for allowing for a pro-development nexus to counter likely anti-development, nimbyist pressures arising from the new localism – so will be important. 

The main elements of the government’s plans that will affect planning applications are set out in the box, above. A great deal is still up for grabs.  The RIBA will be offering its ideas to the government about how to improve the system in way that makes it more rather than less likely that things will get built; but without throwing away the progress that has been made in establishing the importance of design in the consideration of planning applications. 

Peter Stewart of the Peter Stewart Consultancy is an architect and chair of the RIBA planning group

All change

Coalition reforms: so far
> Regional spatial strategies abolished
> Minimum housing densities abolished
> PPS3 amended to end ‘garden grabbing’

Coalition reforms: to follow
> Policy and decision making to be more locally based
> Presumption in favour of sustainable development
> Local Housing Trusts will be allowed to bring forward housing without need for planning approval if there is local support
> Charettes/Enquiry by Design for major projects