Comment

Planning for the future: Are the Government getting it done?

Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, has today outlined the Government’s plans for housing and planning following the announcements in yesterday’s 2020 Budget.

Entitled ‘Planning for the future’, the document sets out the Government’s ambitions to build more homes, increase home ownership and provide security for those who do not own their own homes.

The overarching objective of today’s announcements are very much welcomed – to build more homes, in the right places, that people want to live in, and that people are able to access and afford.

The prelude to today’s announcements indicated that we were likely to see significant ‘reforms’ to the planning system to help deliver the new homes that are needed. In reality, a lot of the commitments are nothing new and instead indicate that the Government – and its agencies – may be looking to use their existing powers to a greater extent than currently. This is not totally unwelcome. Perhaps evolution of the planning system, rather than a radical re-write, is more likely to deliver more homes now.

What is unavoidable from the announcements is that the onus is well and truly on Local Planning Authorities to plan positively for new housing. The effectiveness of the plan-led system is crucial to achieving the Government’s objectives and balancing the challenges of increasing housing delivery whilst ensuring new development is ‘beautiful’, supported by local communities, and increasingly energy-efficient.

A number of budgetary commitments announced yesterday seek to stimulate housing development, and reward those authorities that do actively promote and secure housing growth. Whilst the commitment to fiscal assistance is welcomed, the impact will be fairly limited if Local Plans are not in place. In other words, appropriate sites need to be allocated for development, so that funding can be allocated and spent. Those schemes that benefit from funding also need to be in the right place and of the right quality; decisions that can only appropriately be made via the plan-making process.

A deadline of December 2023 (over three and a half years’ time) for up-to-date Local Plans to be in place has now been set. The objective of ‘speeding up’ plan-making and encouraging full coverage is welcomed, but we are concerned that the unintended effect of today’s announcements may be further delay in the plan-making process. This is not the first time we have seen authorities threatened with intervention if plans are not made in a timely manner, the then Secretary of State Sajid Javid made the same promise in March 2018. Yet most of those authorities name checked are still without a plan, two years later.

If the Government is to meet its ambition of delivering 300,000 dwellings per year then action is needed now to deliver in the areas where plans are stalling. Areas which are largely districts and boroughs with the greatest housing needs.

There is clearly a raft of further ‘reform’ and detail to come over the next few months, including within the forthcoming Planning White Paper (likely to be within the next three months), Strategy (expected to be published alongside the Spending Review in the autumn) and a revised NPPF (timescales TBC).

The unintended consequences of today’s announcements, therefore, are the potential for further delay as local authorities await further clarity; particularly in relation to revisions to the standard methodology and ‘zoning’.

All of this, of course, comes at a time when resources in local authorities are under increasing pressure; a situation which could be compounded further by the threat of having to refund planning application fees where applicants are successful on appeal.

There is also a concern that setting a deadline may not necessarily deliver the Government’s other objectives in terms of delivering high-quality, ‘beautiful’ places and promoting the zero-carbon agenda.

A number of ‘carrot and stick’ measures have been tried by the Conservative and Coalition Governments before, including setting deadlines for Local Plans to be adopted. Those deadlines have been and gone, and with the exception of a small handful of examples, the threat of intervention has failed to have any ‘teeth’ as the Government largely didn’t follow through on their powers of intervention. In this context, it is unclear how seriously the new deadline will be taken.

The Government has to get it right this time. Effective and timely Local Plans are so critical to achieving cross-party ambitions for increasing housing delivery, in the right place and of the right quality. As always, the devil will be in the detail, and we await the release of further information over the coming months.

12 March 2020