In defence of planning

It’s Whitehall that should carry responsibility for the unique achievement of making planning more procedurally complex while being much less effective in delivering high-quality outcomes.

Nonetheless, it’s plain that there is another side to the story. The first point is that the system we have now is deregulated, demoralised and chronically underfunded. Planning has taken one of the biggest cuts of all local government departments, partly a result of endless and misdirected criticism of the service. The fact that there are so few planners that developers can’t even get a decent service is not the fault of planners.

Reform over the past seven years has been driven, so the government says, by the needs of developers – so sensible regional planning was abolished and replaced by the complexity of the duty to co-operate.

Policy is overwhelmingly focused on the provision of the five-year land supply; key standards around space and energy performance and accessibility have been ditched. The policy in the National Planning Policy Framework itself embeds a viability test which is designed to ensure Local Plan policy does nothing that compromises the profits of willing landowners and developers

Year on year, profits for the volume house builders are at record highs; the number of permissions we give for housing are now running at around 250,000 per annum. Around 90% of applications are approved, and the success rate for developers at appeal for major housing is at an unprecedently high level, regularly exceeding a 50% success rate since 2012. The question is not whether planning is a problem but whether there is any decent planning left at all.

“It’s for local authorities and not developers to decide what is in the public interest.”

The planning system should be a creative and effective way of shaping places which meet our needs over the long term, but it’s for local authorities and not developers to decide what is in the public interest. As Sir John Calcutt pointed out in his review of housebuilding, developers have an obligation to the investors and shareholders, and this does not automatically align with what society needs for decent affordable places in well-planned communities.

The root cause of many of our problems with building homes is that planning is not clear, strong and effective. This isn’t helped by government changing the rules every five minutes. There are also deep-seated problems with land market, from the role of intermediaries in speculation to the blanket optioning of land which squeezes small developers out.

We need much greater transparency in the land market and effective ways to ensure that land allocated for development promotes diverse delivery options from a range of providers. The complexity of negotiating Section 106 and the Community Infrastructure Levy should be replaced with a simple and modest land tax, used to fund infrastructure provision.

Ultimately a game is being played by government to play off developers and planners and communities and councils to try and avoid their own responsibility to ensure the right kind of development is built in the right place. Developers can’t be expected to shoulder all the burdens of new infrastructure, and everyone needs a common set of decent building standards to work to with.

The job of government is not to walk away but to ensure we have creative, long-term plans and that there is a consensus for what and where we build. Above all it’s government’s responsibility to stop pointing the finger of blame at planners and developers and to ensure that high-quality and affordable homes are built for our growing population.

Hugh Ellis, head of policy, Town and Country Planning Association