Jeremy's Blog 7th August 2020: Planning

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 6th August 2020

A month ago, I wrote here:
“The interruption to public life and the economy created by the pandemic is now both a prompt and political cover for change in the planning system that would be more controversial in other circumstances.”
Today’s White Paper on the English planning system follows the recent extensions to permitted development rights. We need to look clearly at what has been put on the table.

It criticises the system as too complex, opaque and time-consuming – from plan-making to viability issues - with discretionary decisions rather than rules-based ones and, lacking trust and interest in design, resulting in poor outcomes.

This can be seen as a fundamental critique of the entire system as it has developed since its 1947 introduction into a war-exhausted economy. Already showing strains in the growth of the mid-1950s and heavily adapted since in response to economic and social change, the challenge put, using international comparisons, is that the system is counter-productive in so restricting the volume of land for development for so long, ignoring the signals from market prices as to where development should happen, that it drives up land prices, leading to smaller, less convenient houses with higher and more volatile prices. Meanwhile, smaller builders lose out.

At its most basic:

• there was no systematic trend in real housing land prices from 1892 to 1955, despite the growth in households and real household incomes
• between 1955 and 2008, the post-inflation price of housing land rose over 12 times.

In crowded Holland, newbuild houses are said to be 40 per cent larger and 45 per cent cheaper per square metre than in the UK.

With the zoning approach used variously elsewhere, the shift may yet be of emphasis, with more weight on master plans and, instead of site-specific decisions (seen to add risk and time to the process), a novel interest in design and quality.

Other than how a planning committee will cope with beauty, we shall want to understand such points as:

• how land will be zoned to meet demand
• the tolerance for small scale development in protected areas
• how a national levy would replace CIL (not universally applied) and planning obligations with the different markets around the UK
• how, with that national levy, affordable housing will draw on planning gain.

With most planning changes routinely described as “radical”, we shall see if this one does yield change.