Planning White Paper: how will the government’s overhaul change the planning system?

Much of the discussion surrounding the white paper has so far centred on its proposals for a new approach to land categorisation, which represents a step towards a zonal planning system.

Unlike the current regime where local authorities are required to demonstrate a five-year supply of land for housing, they would now need to divide all sites in their area into one of three categories: protected, renewal and growth. This is how councils will decide where the housing they have been told to build by the government will go.

Protected is as it sounds, while in growth areas developers would get automatic planning permission. Some commentators have voiced concern about the quality of homes delivered through this route.

“There are ways it could be effective and sustainable and ways it could deliver a lot of conflict,” muses Ms Bessell. “It could deliver unregulated development which is just about volume numbers – some would say risking slums of the future. I don’t think it’s at either of those ends.”

For her part, Ms Hills argues that it is “overly simplistic to put all the land in the country into three categories”. What label, she asks, should be attached to the suburbs? The case could be made that these areas are often ripe for greater density, though the people living there may well disagree.

However, deciding which sites should be protected will perhaps be less of a challenge for local authorities “than setting the tests for development where that does apply,” says Mr Spry. Deciding density and design standards for renewal areas – which could include most urban land – “will be the most difficult bit,” he predicts.

Ms Jessell agrees that the renewal category will likely have the widest scope and be most controversial – potentially paving the way for carte blanche estate regeneration, for example.

The role of local plans will be dramatically revised under the proposed new system. Currently, these are the route through which councils decide how much housing will be built in their areas and where.

Ministers want to scale back or streamline these aspects of local plans – partially through measures outlined above – while significantly beefing up their role in other respects. Most importantly, local plans will become the primary vehicle for community engagement with planning policies and development.

At the moment most of this process happens “downstream”, Ms Hills explains, with residents commenting on individual planning applications. “Things will be agreed at the local plan stage, and the community won’t be able to have a say three years down the line at the development stage,” she adds. Of all the white paper’s proposals, she predicts this will be the area “that will vex local politicians and communities most”.

Ms Bessell agrees that people are unlikely to be satisfied with exchanging the ability to object to individual schemes for greater engagement earlier on in the planning process. Involving people in the early decision-making “could be a very good thing,” she adds, but notes that to make it work “you’ve got to capture the imagination of communities to take an active role”. That, she argues, “is a real skill and requires investment, technology and time”.

At the same time, the government intends to legislate so that local plans must be developed within two-and-a-half years – the current average is seven. The logic, Mr Spry explains, is that the “process and evidential hoops” associated with preparing local plans can be stripped out in favour of “more heavy lifting” in terms of actual specific policies on matters like housing density.

Nevertheless, he says, writing up a local plan which addresses all the detailed policy questions associated with development “becomes a really big task”, and Ms Hills is convinced that “you’re going to lose some engagement somewhere along the line”.

An essential aspect of the new-look local plans will be their design codes. Councils will need to prescribe what they want from housing delivered in their areas, from aesthetics to transport links to energy efficiency credentials and everything in between.

This will be the primary lever for ensuring homes built in growth and renewal areas are good quality and is intended to give developers certainty over what is acceptable. It marks a considerably enhanced role for design codes, which Ms Bessell says currently carry only “relatively weak” influence in the planning decision process and tend to be piecemeal.

Ms Hills says the use of design codes to uphold development standards “puts a big expectation on local areas” and that council design teams producing the codes “are going to need some support”. Ms Bessell agrees the approach “is very reliant on these design codes really delivering” and says that ensuring they lead to a drive up towards better standards rather than a drive down to the minimum will be a challenge.

At the same time, to successfully speed up the system as ministers intend, Mr Spry notes that the codes will need to be highly specific in order to avoid back and forth between councils and builders over the details.

The white paper’s ruminations on developer contributions – the mechanism through which affordable housing and other public benefits are secured from housing schemes – have also garnered significant attention. The government wants to scrap the Section 106 planning agreement and the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and replace them with a new flat-rate Infrastructure Levy. Tied to final development values, it moves closer towards a land value capture approach to developer contributions.

Section 106 “has been successful” at securing large sums and numbers of affordable homes from developers, says Ms Bessell, but “often the time and money that goes into delivering this is disproportionate”.

“I don’t think anyone would say Section 106 and CIL are perfect, but whatever you replace that with, however you dress it up, it has to deliver affordable housing,” adds Ms Hills.

The government insists that the new system will deliver “at least as much – if not more” onsite affordable housing, but there are some concerns. Mr Spry says that while the Infrastructure Levy “does have the potential to capture more value”, it will be technically difficult to make that a certainty. “The levy still relies on judgements about benchmark land values which sound simple but in practice are difficult to judge,” he explains.

“The other thing which is an ongoing issue is that the cake can only be cut so many ways,” argues Ms Hills. “Layering on additionality of things planning can deliver will mean it comes down to choices. Net zero, affordable homes, schools, infrastructure [and] healthcare all cost money and pushing all that on a levy and thinking that will be delivering everything is not going to be the case.”

Perhaps most importantly, the government is proposing to set the Infrastructure Levy nationally “at either a single rate or at area-specific rates”. If it is the former, this could pose serious problems for lower-value areas. The same rate of levy will provide much more value in Cambridge than in Teesside, where margins are much tighter, severely limiting the resources available for good-quality affordable housing, Ms Bessell warns. “It will have the opposite effect of levelling up and embed inequalities and that is a real concern.”

While not as headline-grabbing as some of its other proposals, measures outlined in the white paper to digitalise the planning system could be seismic. Many will be familiar with the innumerate unwieldy documents and drawings attached to planning applications on council portals – the government wants to move away from that.

Local plans should be “based on the latest digital technology”, the white paper says, with much greater use of data. Meanwhile, it envisions that “new digital engagement processes will make it radically easier to raise views about and visualise emerging proposals while on the go on a smart phone”.

These changes are “long overdue” says Ms Bessell, and done well “could truly make the system accessible” and revolutionise public involvement in planning, playing a crucial role in some of government’s other proposals discussed above. The impact on the profession, she says, could be similar to the radical advancements in science facilitated by the Human Genome Project.

Ms Hills – whose organisation has long called for greater use of technology in planning – welcomes the sentiment, but adds: “Well, my goodness, they’re going to need to resource that.”