Two Labour manifesto pledges will be of great interest to Construction News readers. First: “We will aim to simplify and speed up the planning process for major infrastructure projects of vital national interest.” And second: “Labour will reform the planning system to speed up decision-making, promote the most efficient use of land, and strike the right balance of environmental protection, safer communities and economic growth.” But these lines aren’t taken from the 2024 manifesto – they come from those published in 1997 and 2001 respectively.
After the past 14 years of failed Tory efforts, it is perhaps unfair to blame Labour for the impotence of previous planning reforms in shifting the dial on housing and infrastructure. The moral is, rather, that planning reform is only part of the picture when boosting development.
Yesterday, the government published its proposed revisions to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) – a document which, on its initial release in 2012, was touted as another radical innovation to clear planning blockages. The document contains a number of positive proposals.
The move most likely to prove a game-changer on delivery is the encouragement for councils to release ‘greybelt’ land – previously-developed land in the greenbelt – for development. While the noise from the government has been all about housing delivery, the NPPF is clear that commercial and other types of development will also be allowed on the greybelt. In high-demand areas where transport links can be provided, developers are likely to rush in. How much work goes to homebuilders and how much to contractors will partly depend on the decisions councils make on what types of development they plan for any sites they release.
The NPPF proposals also include the restoration of homebuilding targets scrapped in 2018, with the national figure boosted from 300,000 to 370,000 a year, as well as the addition of onshore wind, laboratories and data centres to the national infrastructure planning regime. Some 300 planning officers will be recruited to planning authorities, while communities minister Angela Rayner has already shown an active desire to call in planning applications.
So far, however, there is no extra money to deliver new homes and other development.
In some ways, Labour seems to be adopting reverse Trussonomics. Former prime minister Liz Truss fell partly because she announced tax and spending cuts without any accompanying regulatory reforms. Labour is announcing a bunch of changes to regulations without any tax or spending measures. We will have to wait until the next Budget to see if that position changes.
Financial viability is a much bigger issue than planning in holding back development – you can open the planning door but you can’t make homebuilders and developers walk through it unless the numbers add up.
