Roy Pinnock is a partner in the planning and public law team at Dentons
How do we change and progress without abandonment and destruction? How many eggs do we break to make the omelette? How do we move from reacting to planning, which involves vision, bravery, risk, commitment, and then to delivering? These are questions the new Labour government is grappling with – not least when it comes to planning reforms.
Simplifying the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is a starting point. Below are some of the key areas that require attention.
Homebuilding
Reinstating mandatory housing targets makes great sense. Taking them away from the local district level altogether would be better. Housing markets rarely work at this level, and trying to make strategic decisions locally has largely been unsuccessful.
Local plans have had to contend with strategic planning, while planning applications have had to wrestle with local-plan issues.
Appeals have been used to try to make sense of it all, but this has not made the best use of scarce planning professionals.
Strategic planning
Strategic planning creates a challenge of subsidiarity. Not planning strategically creates (far worse) competing challenges of unaccountability, intransigence, under-delivery, mistrust and stasis.
Strategic planning is a fundamental part of a successful economy, and it is interesting to see a review of previous planning refusals of two data centres among the new government’s first steps.
What will be the framework for future applications, though? The government’s suggestion of a broader spatial plan for energy and infrastructure, and restarting onshore wind, are first steps.
More planners
Planning functions have seen 50 per cent reductions in budgets since 2010, while policy officers have been reallocated to manage developments that have popped up.
“Commercial players will need to show leadership rather than expect the government to do it all”
Supporting planning as a visionary, inspiring, creative industry has to be at the forefront of the government’s laudable promise to get 300 planners appointed back into local authorities.
Initiatives like Public Practice, the social enterprise with a mission to build the public sector’s capacity to improve places, which expanded last year with Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities support, are critical to this mission. It should be noted that, as of 8 July, the department has reverted to its former name of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
It’s a truly cross-departmental mission for the government and the industry to work out how government and the planning industry can contribute to an increase in qualified planners working in the public sector proportionate to the increase in housing delivery needed.
Commercial players will need to show leadership in this space rather than expect the government to do it all.
Reimagining the greenbelt
It is wholly wrong that land can be allocated for development but still retained as greenbelt.
Fixing the NPPF so that allocated sites cannot promise/rely on growth on the one hand but retain greenbelt designation on the other should be a priority.
It is tricky to speak in general terms about green and greybelt. Greybelt is said to be land within the greenbelt that is in bad condition – previously developed, such that greenbelt protection is no longer deserved.
There is a risk in some cases that this misses the point. Greenbelt is a spatial planning tool – its role is to keep places separate and relieve the feeling of unrelenting urban sprawl that began to creep in 100 years ago.
Because it is not an amenity designation or a national park, it is largely irrelevant whether it looks nice in performing that function.
The government’s commitment to review the greenbelt is a big step forward because there is currently no legal or policy requirement to do so.
Taking stock and simply asking: what do we need to provide? Where? Where would we need to shift the urban-separation zone to? How good is the current urban-separation zone? How does that inform the approach? This is planning, not reacting.
But there is little point in asking 317 authorities scattered across England to do it if there is any expectation of enthusiasm, coherence or speed. Better to make a strategic choice to plan for the next 40 years with a clear vision of success, rather than a fixation with the world remaining as it is.
