Jeremy's Blog 14th July 2023: The Challenge of Development
This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 13th July 2023
Our development control system was created in 1947 in an economy depressed in the wake of war and when it was thought that “the man in Whitehall knows best”. Distinctive around the globe for its site-specific micro-management, it has been under growing strain for decades. What was intended as a technocratic process became more open and then overtaken by the popular resistance to development seen in many areas.
With between 400,000 and 500,000 applications a year, from the trivial to the large, it is overwhelmed by what it has to do while being under-resourced and under-staffed. The RTPI has reported that “Local Authority net expenditure on planning has fallen by 43%, from £844m in 2009/10 to £480m in 2020/21” while “Less than half (49%) of planning applications were decided within statutory time limits in 2021 – continuing a downwards trend since 2010”. That is aggravated as ever more is expected of it – now wrestling with nutrient neutrality, soon with biodiversity net gain and local nature recovery strategies and then design codes while many environmental changes may require permission. Yet, after decades of needing local plans, many authorities still do not have one; others wait on the Levelling Up Bill before reviewing theirs.
Only radical change will produce anything different. The RTPI, devoted to planning as a concept, has looked to a French model for “planning agencies” operating as an arm’s length service shared between authorities. Others look to relieve the load, suggesting that an already widening array of permitted development rights could be much extended and compliance for, say, homeowner uses self-certified.
Our system is failing our ever-evolving economy and society, starving it of the capacity needed to thrive and resolve competing land uses. Shutting people out by building too few houses, small and expensively, we make matters worse by only tackling symptoms, notably in the let sector. Green Belts, intended to keep settlements separate, are used to frustrate development more widely. “Under the counter”, though, England has added 93,000 dwellings by permitted development rights between April 2015 and March 2022 – 4,500 by Class Q – acting as a small, surreptitious safety valve.
England’s 2020 planning white paper died a political death for proposing a form of zoning and that houses should go where prices relative to wages point to the greatest shortage. We have a 300,000 annual target now without teeth while Labour, currently seeming more positive about development and breaching the “taboo” of the Green Belt, is hazy about the effective national targets needed. With the exception of the new towns programme of the 1950s and 1960s, we have largely kept the settlement geography of the 1940s when international comparison suggests we are now some 2 million houses short. At the large scale level, rather than continue to overload existing settlements and their infrastructure, the answer seems to lie in new towns driven by development corporations.
The Levelling Up Bill supplements the tools for that but the missing ingredient is the leadership to explain and gain assent for the change needed, for infrastructure as much as for housing, stressing the environmental framework for this. Instead, we indulge a complacent resistance to change, unaware of or unwilling to recognise the challenges, ducking them rather finding the way to manage them well.
Those challenges are not only competing land uses, a severe housing shortage and an economy frustrated from giving us the income we need but also climate change, even that already due. Renewable power will need to be produced and transmitted at enormous scale. The south east needs water supply. Flooding will add housing pressure if some settlements become untenable. As climate change makes food dearer, farming needs reservoirs, controlled environment facilities, slurry stores and other development while land use change may be driven by forces larger than planners.
The lotus-eating years should be behind us.