Delay, Poor Decisions and Under Resourcing: The un-acknowledged cost of planning reform.
If you are to believe the national press we are only a week away from the next great Planning Reform Day.
According to The Guardian on 19 October, Simon Clarke is due to give a speech unveiling the next iteration of the government's planning reform agenda.
According to recent reporting, the package of measures being considered include:
- Yet another expansion of permitted development rights;
- A potential increase in the threshold for requiring the provision of affordable housing to 40 or 50 units;
- The potential easing, or lifting, of biodiversity net gain and nutrient/ water neutrality requirements; and
- A change to green belt policy to allow more development on brownfield sites.
If some of this feels familiar, that may be because it is.
Increasing the affordable housing threshold was amongst the 'technical reforms' consulted on alongside the Planning For The Future White Paper in 2020.
It was a ... contentious... proposal that was quietly dropped after attracting significant opposition.
This may not be the last of the ideas in Planning for the Future to return from the political graveyard. DLUHC has recently confirmed that Jack Airey, one of its architects, has been appointed as a special advisor in the Department - following his stint in number 10, advising Boris Johnson.
This latest iteration of announcements will be the third major set of planning reforms announced since 2020; and the second set of reforms this calendar year.
Clarke's speech is currently scheduled to take place before the Levelling Up & Regeneration Bill is due to come out of committee stage in the commons.
This rapid and seemingly endless cycle of change is not without cost.
The adoption of new local plans is slowing dramatically. According to reporting by Planning Resource, in early September, nineteen local authorities had withdrawn or delayed their local plans over the previous twelve months. Since that article was published, at least another three have joined the list, with Uttlesford and South Norfolk announcing delays, and Dudley withdrawing from the Joint Black Country plan.
The reasons given for the delays were mixed, but two themes do crop up with depressing frequency:
- The sheer uncertainty caused by the government's rapid (and occasionally inconsistent) policy reform programme; and
- Resourcing.
The issue of resourcing was thrown into the spotlight last week, when an officer of Leeds City Council publicly stated that the Council does not have enough money to provide all of its statutory planning functions at the moment, which is putting the council at risk of poor decision-making.
Leeds is not alone. St Albans has blamed a lack of resources for delays to its local plan, and, at one point, Slough had reportedly lost the entirety of its plan-making budget.
It is, however, one of the first councils to expressly make the link between the government's planning reform agenda and its resourcing issues, with the Chief Planning Officer quoted as saying that:
"there were “challenges coming down the line” due to the government’s ongoing changes to the planning system. One announcement earlier in the year “was around improved digitisation of planning services”, he added, “and we are very mindful of that infrastructure needing to be put into place”.
It should probably go without saying that expecting already resource strapped authorities to respond to such a rapidly changing national policy environment is going to be problematic. This latest announcement is a sign of just how difficult things have become.
Perhaps the most radical thing this government could do would be to stabilize and properly fund the departments attempting to deliver our current system, instead of embarking on yet another round of reform.
Labour councillor Jane Dowson said the authority was “quite vulnerable to poor planning decisions”, before asking Feeney whether there was “enough money given to planning to actually hit all the functions that you actually have as a department”.
Feeney answered: “I would say, no. Although we are obviously doing our best with the resources we have available to us and the measures we introduce to try and streamline the system and improve matters to get a quality of decision and outcomes.”
Feeney said there were “challenges coming down the line” due to the government’s ongoing changes to the planning system. One announcement earlier in the year “was around improved digitisation of planning services”, he added, “and we are very mindful of that infrastructure needing to be put into place”.”
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