Planning: is a change gonna come?

The Labour government was elected on a manifesto which included a commitment to 'kickstart' growth, reforming planning rules to build railways, roads, laboratories and one-and-a-half million homes, and developing a new 10-year infrastructure strategy.

The planning system – or perhaps more accurately the planning application system, now branded as 'development management' but previously known as 'development control' – has often been blamed for holding up development in England and Wales. In truth, it is only part of the picture, highlighting tensions that exist between forward planning and deciding applications, the desire to speed up planning decision-making whilst taking account of the views of the public and an increased awareness of environmental issues.

The consultation launched by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government seeks views not only on revising the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF, which was introduced to fanfare in 2012, replacing several thousand pages of policy and guidance), but also on some wider proposals. The consultation makes it clear that the government believes that sustained economic growth is the only route to improving the prosperity of the country and the living standards of its people, stating that 'nowhere is decisive reform needed more urgently than in our planning system'. The main proposals are:

• Making a 'standard method' for assessing housing need mandatory, requiring local authorities to plan for the resulting need figure and planning for a lower figure only when they can demonstrate 'hard' constraints and have exhausted all other options;
• Reversing changes to the NPPF made in 2023 which were detrimental to housing supply;
• Implementing the new standard method to ensure local plans support the government’s manifesto commitment to one-and-a-half million new homes in this parliament.
• Broadening the existing definition of brownfield land, setting a strengthened expectation that applications on such land will be approved and that plans should promote an uplift in density in urban areas;
• Identifying 'grey belt' land within the green belt, to be brought forward into the planning system through both plan and decision-making to meet development needs;
• Improving the operation of the 'presumption in favour of sustainable development', to ensure it acts an effective failsafe to support housing supply, by clarifying the circumstances when it applies, and introducing new safeguards to make clear that its application cannot justify poor quality development;
• Delivering affordable, well-designed homes, with new 'golden rules' for land released in the green belt to ensure it serves the public interest;
• Making wider changes to ensure that local planning authorities are able to prioritise the types of affordable homes their communities need in all housing development, and that the planning system supports a more diverse housebuilding sector;
• Supporting economic growth in key sectors, aligned with the government’s industrial strategy and future local growth plans, including laboratories, gigafactories, datacentres, digital economies and freight and logistics, given their importance to the economic future;
• Delivering community needs to support society and the creation of healthy places; and
• Supporting clean energy and the environment, including through support for onshore wind and renewables.

In many ways, much of this simply reflects underlying ambitions which have existed for the last half century or more.

However, some specific proposed policy changes are bound to give rise to controversy, such as those relating to the much-misunderstood green belt (which is not a benchmark of landscape quality, but which exists to prevent coalescence of settlements), and the proposed 'grey belt' (described as areas of previously developed land and/or land that make a limited contribution to green belt purposes, although the exact definition is one of the matters subject to consultation).

Of potential immediate impact is a proposal that housing need can justify 'very special circumstances' for green belt release, and a requirement for local planning authorities to review, and if necessary alter, green belt boundaries when they cannot otherwise fully meet their housing or commercial requirements. The proposal is for a 'sequential' approach to green belt release, prioritising previously developed land in sustainable locations, before considering grey belt land in 'sustainable locations', and finally 'other sustainable locations' within the green belt. It is made clear that development of grey belt land is not regarded as 'inappropriate'.

The potential complicating factor is the proposed introduction of new development management policies ('golden rules') that will apply both to development on land released from the green belt via local plans and development allowed through the development management system. For housing schemes, it is proposed these should be subject to the provision of at least 50% affordable housing (subject to viability), relevant infrastructure improvements, and provision or improvement of green spaces accessible to the public.

It is arguable that the proposed changes represent little more than tinkering, and that the fundamental flaws with the planning system as a whole – in particular, the disconnect between forward planning at a national level and development management at a local level – remain unaddressed. There are also practical issues which have been sidestepped completely – such as flood risk and the sequential test, nutrient neutrality and its poor relation water neutrality, and town centres in a post-Covid world – which would undoubtedly benefit from a national approach.

However, although it would be churlish not to welcome the fresh look being taken at national planning policy, as successive governments have found when it comes to actually delivering development this is only one part of the jigsaw, and it is inevitable that resourcing impacts on that picture.

In the year ending March 2023, local authorities in England received 395,600 planning applications (down 14% from the previous year). In that context, the proposal to recruit 300 new planning officers (presumably waiting in deep freeze somewhere waiting for the call, and less than one for each of the 324 local planning authorities in England) is unlikely to break the logjam of delay. Similar issues affect the 'safety nets' for decision making of the Planning Inspectorate (where there are 424 planning inspectors as at the end of January 2024, with a monthly average of 1,529 decisions issued monthly over the past 12 months) and the Planning Court.

Inevitably we may not get the planning system that we deserve, but the one that we pay for. 

Philip Kratz is head of planning at GSC Solicitors LLP and chair of the Law Society’s Planning and Environmental Law Committee