(Updated 9th August 2020)

Summary of Planning for the Future

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick’s new White Paper on Planning for the Future has three main ideas. First, that the planning system is slow and inefficient. He aims to make it faster by simplifying it and moving it online using open standards and data. 

Second, to address shortages of housing that make UK homes twice as expensive as in Italy, Germany or the Netherlands, he will set councils harder and higher requirements for new housing in expensive areas, especially in and around cities. 

Third, he accepts recommendations of the late Sir Roger Scruton’s Building Better Building Beautiful Commission, to ensure new buildings are more beautiful and more human, by requiring the creation of design codes that new development ‘should’ conform with.

Bigger harder targets

The real teeth are in the new, higher, binding housing requirement of 300,000 new homes per year, focused on expensive and particularly urban areas. The Government will adjust those targets to allow for green belt and other protected land, but will expect councils to allow better use of low density brownfield land. It will also remove the current cap on what the targets can be. That all means some councils, particularly in the South East, will face much higher housing targets. 

He aims to give more certainty after local plans have been written, by ‘bringing the democracy forward‘ into the creation of plans rather than during the application for permission. This part of the White Paper has been controversial. But in fact it is unlikely to harm residents much, because any land allocated for development under an existing local plan is already virtually certain to get planning permission on appeal eventually, even if the council initially turns it down. To achieve that, he will replace the entire corpus of plan making law in England. He will also strengthen planning enforcement.

Legalistic ‘evidence bases’ will be replaced with a council’s statement of reasons. The inspector can approve the plan with the reasons given by the council or amend it as requested by third parties, using their reasons.* Councils considered at ‘higher risk’ of missing the new time limit of 30 for writing their plan (with an extra year if they already have one adopted or submitted) will get mandatory visits from the planning inspectorate. If they miss the deadline, the Government can step in directly and write its own plan, in consultation with local people. Local authorities ‘could’ prepare design codes at the same time as writing their plans, or afterwards.

Move towards zoning and design codes

New local plans will become a map divided into three types of zone, and a key specifying the permitted uses for each site. New allocations of greenfield sites for housing will become ‘growth’ zones suitable for substantial development, where outline planning permission is granted by the local plan itself. Masterplanning can either be done by the council at plan stage or as a planning condition. Development management policies will mainly be moved from local plans into national policy. (Does this mean Mayfair will have the same rules about noise and mitigation as rural Yorkshire?) Environmental assessments will become more efficient, so they are considered up front and with open data.

Unlike the zoning system in other countries, which are so precise that they are unambiguous, these proposals seem to keep some discretion at later stages as councils decide on more technical aspects of the development. How exactly that will work is still to be announced.

In existing settlements where some development is desirable, to be labelled as ‘renewal’ areas on the local plan, he proposes a strengthened presumption in favour of development for the uses specified in the local plan for that area. Under the fast track to beauty, if a building complies with a design code and other requirements, there will be an automatic planning permission or permitted development right.

The design codes are to be ‘more binding’ (than what?), whereas the new requirement for housing numbers will be ‘binding’; is there a difference? Local authorities will still be allowed to grant approval for developments that do not comply with the local plan, although it may be tougher. Permitted development will apparently be extended further, subject to the new design codes and could also be made subject to the new developer levy, to remove the current loophole. There will be nationally set standards and codes, as well as locally set standards and codes.

In conservation areas and other ‘protected’ areas, the current system remains essentially unchanged. He will facilitate enhancing historic buildings and making them more energy efficient, perhaps by allowing experienced conservation architects to determine that listed building consent is not required for routine matters – as is technically the law now if the historic character of the building is unaffected, although the risk of criminal penalties has a chilling effect.

There will be even more teeth if he adopts the idea he floats of deemed permission when authorities fail to decide a planning application in time. Planning applications will be made simpler, with more delegation to officers if the planning application complies with the local plan.

Raise more money from developers

The Government aims to simplify the current system of levies on developers and replace it with a single flat rate percentage infrastructure levy on land value, paid when the homes are occupied. That will remove the current lengthy process of negotiation. With a single national rate, the percentage rate levied will fall in some high cost areas, but the Government claims that the overall amount raised should increase, presumably through more being built in more expensive places under the new targets. But the ‘section 106’ agreements that he intends to replace are also used for things like new rights of way, which cannot efficiently be replaced with a cash sum. Hopefully that will be saved.

Councils will be able to borrow against the new levy and use it for infrastructure, social housing, and general purposes. It promises to ensure that affordable housing provision supported through developer contributions is kept at least at current levels and that it is still delivered on site. How it will do that remains to be seen.

There is also a suggestion that landowners who want their sites to be included for growth or renewal in the local plan should pay a fee to the council, to help fund creation of the new local plan.

New towns and large sites?

The Government wants to expand the use of Development Consent Orders for new towns and other large sites, and to look at reforming Development Corporations. Some think that may be very significant.

Easier neighbourhood planning

Mr Jenrick will also make it easier to write neighbourhood plans, which will still have their current power to set design codes. Design codes can take a lot of work: under current law they require a technical ‘evidence base’ that can be costly and lengthy to write. His intention to reduce the current legalistic requirements for evidence bases for plans and design codes will help make things easier. In addition, he will set up a new body to support the delivery of ‘provably locally popular’ design codes.

There is a hint of a new process for addressing neighbour concerns after permission in principle has been granted. Will this involve neighbour consents like a scheme in New Zealand, or lack of objection as the Government has suggested before? 

More transparency

An accompanying consultation also asks about more transparency for options over land, which are often not publicly disclosed. They should be careful not to encourage existing owners to hold out for higher prices, which would prevent plot assembly by someone trying to regenerate a dilapidated area. Ebenezer Howard’s schemes would have been impossible if he had to tell the selling landowners he was collecting land for a new garden city.

The obvious first step to make land data more available is to remove the fee for land registry data. Private databases have already collected it all; there is no good reason not to make it available to everyone. It is a public good. The land registry office already makes it available for a fee, so there can be no privacy issues.

If you want more detail on all of the above, this video with Chris Katkowski QC is very helpful, as is this summary by Zack Simons.

The right direction?

There are many good things in the White Paper. No one with any sense can object to making the planning system more efficient. Beauty and better design will no doubt help overcome the political obstacles to more housing, as will better developer contributions to address the negative effects of new developments. In proposing harder, higher, more focused numerical housing requirements, the White Paper is implicitly recognizing that efficiency, beauty, and better mitigation will not be enough on their own to deliver the many homes we need.

Unlike all our other rules about land use, the planning system was never designed to find win-win solutions that would address spillover effects on other people. There is enormous scope to build well, ensuring plentiful affordable housing, while making the local community happier – solving the political obstacles to even more ambitious reform. 

The White Paper expresses interest in achieving that, by giving single streets of residents the power to allow more development of forms that they are happy to see. That should unlock a growing tide of graceful urban intensification and new homes as residents of ugly bungalows or semi-detached houses realize they could retire if they gave themselves permission to build beautiful terraces or mansion blocks instead. It would be an easy way to get popular design codes and local support in the new ‘renewal’ zones, while enabling more people to walk, cycle and use public transport.

We will only have plentiful, high quality, affordable housing when building new homes is truly popular with the locals. To achieve the two percentage point boost to annual GDP growth that eminent economic historian Nicolas Crafts says better planning would deliver, we would need to go further than this White Paper and adopt bottom-up processes to unleash a popular wave of new building. But this is an ambitious step in what – depending critically on the details and implementation – seems to be generally the right direction.

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* Local plans will be tested against a new single sustainable development test, replacing the ‘soundess’ test and sustainability appraisals. The housing requirement will look at outcomes rather than process: the five year housing supply test will go and be replaced by an annual check on how many homes were actually delivered in the previous five years. The presumption in favour of allowing new development as the penalty when targets are not met will remain.