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The 35% uplift for England’s 20 largest cities and urban centres was always a crude way for Government to bridge the gap between the combined standard method calculation total for each authority across the country and its target of 300,000 new homes a year. It has now been over a year since the uplift policy was introduced and, so far, only the Greater Manchester authorities have considered it as part of the emerging Places for Everyone plan, but no authority has appeared to embrace it.
The ability for any city or urban centre to adequately plan for the additional uplift does depend on whether it can meet its own needs in the first place. Look no further than the London boroughs, Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Wolverhampton, all of which cannot meet their own needs.
There are two key issues preventing these authorities from meeting their own needs, which are inter-related and start to tell the story behind the ineffectual nature of the uplift. These are: tightly drawn administrative boundaries (so neighbouring authorities are expected to contribute to any unmet needs) and Green Belt.
Green Belt is always a political hot potato. Everyone has an opinion on it, even my parents who are extremely unfamiliar with the planning system (who of course oppose it being released for new homes). Applying this uplift to cities and urban areas surrounded by Green Belt was therefore never going to be an easy task politically; as demonstrated by the recent example of the Greater Nottinghamshire Strategic Plan.
Nottingham cannot meet its own needs. Greater Nottinghamshire’s Joint Planning and Advisory Group, meeting on 7 June, agreed the uplift is ‘arbitrary’ and ‘unevidenced’. Therefore, they stated, it does not qualify as an exceptional circumstance for any of Nottingham’s neighbours to release their own Green Belt to contribute towards it as part of the emerging Strategic Plan. A similar case was made by Solihull at their Local Plan examination back in December 2021, in response to the Black Country’s emerging shortfall of circa 28,000 homes (including Wolverhampton’s cities uplift of circa 8,000 homes).
This is not a surprising approach and is likely to be advanced by other areas.
13 of the largest cities and urban centres subject to the uplift are encircled by Green Belt and one is partly surrounded by Green Belt (Derby). Therefore, only six of the cities are not surrounded by any Green Belt.
The total uplift amounts to circa 44,500 new homes a year for those cities and urban centres with Green Belt (circa 12,040 when London is excluded). In comparison, the non-Green Belt cities uplift accounts for only circa 3,030 new homes a year. So, circa 93% of the uplift total for all cities and urban centres would go undelivered if all Green Belt effected cities and urban centres took the same approach as Greater Nottinghamshire. This is significant, particularly at a time of a well-publicised housing crisis.
One area potentially bucking this trend is the Leicester and Leicestershire authorities (unsurprisingly a non-Green Belt area), who published a Statement of Common Ground only in the last month as to how Leicester’s uplift will be distributed around the city’s neighbours. We may have to wait a little while to see what happens here, the published statement was withdrawn last week following ‘further technical information coming to light’.
Notwithstanding the public positions presented above, we also understand a number of the authorities are lobbying Government for the uplift to be removed in its entirety.
There is clear evidence the cities and urban centres uplift has been an ineffective policy to date, which shines a light on the wider use of the duty-to-cooperate (which is an issue for another day). Its days are perhaps, therefore, numbered.
The end of the cities and urban centres uplift would not come as a surprise, the housing secretary said only last week that he will be taking steps to make sure the Planning Inspectorate do not impose unrealistically high housing need figures on local communities.
If the cities and urban centres uplift is to be removed, then the Government must re-look at a more balanced approach to calculating standard method – something Turley has previously advocated for and remains relevant– which would ensure the delivery of 300,000 new homes a year, contribute to the Government’s levelling up agenda and accelerate housing delivery in the short term.
We should know more when the promised National Planning Policy Framework is published in July.
This piece was published in the Land Promoters and Developers Federation (LPDF) newsletter on 14 June 2022.
Please get in touch with Tom Armfield if you would like to discuss this in more detail.
14 June 2022
18 May 2022
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