HOUSES FOR ALL

The government’s proposed Planning Reform Bill is likely to cause heated debate. The principal features of the reforms are to deregulate aspects of the planning system, to speed up decision-making, to provide a new planning process to deal with major developments, and to reform planning gain. Planning was reformed quite radically in 2004 so some parliamentarians may be surprised at the government’s decision to implement a second wave of reforms to quickly.

The reality is that the previous reforms — concentrating on long-term strategic and local policy for place-shaping and new developments — are likely to take some time to bed down, as regional and local authorities draw up their new masterplans. This Bill attempts to deal with the here-and-now, particularly the delivery of new housing developments and major planning projects such as nuclear power stations.

The prime minister has committed the government to providing over 300,000 new houses per year. That, on the surface, is a fine objective. The problem is that it is not the government that builds or gives planning permission locally for new development schemes. The planned provision of housing locally is always a matter for negotiation between housebuilders and local planning authorities.

Although there are planning mechanisms in place to ensure that 300,000 figure is filtered down to regions, counties and districts. Once the local scale is reached, the question becomes one of debate over specific sites, involving local people with diverse views about the merits or otherwise of building on greenfield and brownfield sites.

New government incentives are on offer to local authorities to allocate more land earmarked for new housing, but this may conflict with locally agreed masterplans that restricts growth. The south-east of England, already a development hot spot, will become the focus for more debate as local battles rage over the fate of individual plots of land.

The difficulties involved in delivering national policy objectives at the local level also apply to major development projects. Currently, powers exist for ministers to call-in major development proposals and hold a public inquiry if a scheme raises issues of national or regional significance. This power, which is used sparingly to avoid accusations of central government taking the right of decision away from local democrats, is not without problems. Government ministers have always been uneasy about determining schemes that may have significant local or even national political opposition, aside from the millions of pounds each inquiry costs.

The government may recognise the need for speedier processes to prevent a repeat of the costly terminal five inquiry at Heathrow, but ‘little local difficulties’ still need to be addressed to ensure that new runways, motorways, nuclear power stations, and major manufacturing plant are determined and developed quickly.

The Bill’s proposals are to establish an Independent Planning Commission comprised of experts, rather than ministers, who will take the decision on these major projects, advised by a strong strategic policy steer from the government. The government maintains that it is an attempt to create joined up thinking on projects that have national significance and to combat the ‘not in my backyard’ attitude to development.

But there will be serious questions asked about how the new commission would work and how it would fit in with the democratic process. Environmentalists are already labelling the proposal a ‘developers’ charter’, creating fast-track processes to sweep proposals through with reduced public scrutiny and at a possible cost to environmental safeguards.

The final aspect of the Bill relates to ‘planning gain’. The government has recognised rather belatedly that changing the mechanisms to encourage more housing development is all very well, but what about the investment needed to support new transport, hospitals, schools and community spaces? Through the planning system, local communities can secure a contribution to this infrastructure from developers via section 106 agreements. But only a small proportion of all developers currently contribute to the costs of infrastructure in this way.

The new provisions will empower local authorities to apply standard planning charges, or tariffs, for all new development in their areas to support infrastructure delivery. The government had proposed to implement a planning gain supplement in a separate Bill, but this has now been scrapped following widespread opposition from the developers and the planning profession.

Overall, the reforms will be welcomed in some quarters for tackling some of the more bureaucratic aspects of the planning process. But the pro-development focus of the proposals for major development projects and new housing schemes is likely to come under intense scrutiny from local democrats and the environmental lobby. By talking of more housing and the importance of infrastructure, the government may well find planning becoming a much more significant election issue in marginal constituencies in the not-too-distant future.

Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones is an expert on planning, housing and place-making at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL.