Planning Reform – Labour’s Challenge

Planning Reform – Labour’s Challenge

Less than a week into power and Labour announced their intention is to simplify the planning process. Now, the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has added some meat to the bones and stated the New Government’s intentions to set mandatory housing targets and reform the NPPF before the end of August 2024. The issues with the current system are also identified and cited, laying a lot of blame at the hands of local government and a general ‘say no’ attitude that has stalled construction growth and house building. As always, the argument of development versus protection of the environment will be a dominating factor in determining how this plays out.

 

So what’s changed? Wind back to when I started submitting planning applications, the late 90’s, and the situation was very different. You could phone up a planning officer and have a sensible conversation about what you were proposing. Then you’d draw and submit your information, fill in the form and send the lot off with the fee, job done. Planning conditions were typical scant too. Over the following years additional information requirements have grown and grown, with the most recent revolving around climate emergency policy. The intention of all this information at this stage is apparently to ensure that what has planning approval can actually be built, rather than this simply being conditioned. However, it’s not unusual to receive an approval with more than 30 conditions attached, and we’ve come across approvals that still can’t be physically built as drawn anyway. Part of this is the fact that building regs moves ahead at pace regardless of what you have approval for.

 

What does all this mean for development? Massively increased cost and risk at planning stage, a slowing-down of the process, and importantly, reduced developer confidence that their investment will pay-off. And when I say ‘developer’ I mean anyone who isn’t simply submitting a householder application. Add-in various contributions such as CIL, affordable housing and S.106 and a project can ‘dead’ before it has even got started.

 

The difficulty with reforming the process is that we’re not now going to abandon recently adopted climate emergency policy, or drop the need to deal with flood risk, traffic generation or ecology issues. Many Outline Applications require almost all the information to achieve validation, so there’s often little saving in going down this route over a full application. A pre-app can be a good route to gaining confidence and realising a base value from a site if you are looking to sell with the benefit of planning, and we are seeing this approach adopted more often as it’s much quicker and cheaper to achieve.

 

 

From my personal viewpoint, and I’m speaking on behalf of our applicants, the planning process needs to be much more accessible. A lot of potential applicants, who could be bringing valuable development and the economic benefit they provide, will not even start the process because their belief is that it will be too hard, too expensive, and won’t be successful. I hear this all the time. The reality is most applications are ultimately successful, according to the Government’s statistics, 86%. So once you are able to tick all the boxes an approval can more than often be gained. This statistic doesn’t appear to include applications that are withdrawn and never determined.

 

One ‘simplification’ to the planning system was the Simplified Planning Zone (SPZ), where planning is assumed approved reliant on certain conditions. This can work well for those who have very specific needs. But these zones are currently the exception rather than the rule and these only account for a small proportion of applications. Class Q and R provide simplified routes for specific small rural redevelopments, but this isn’t going to help tackle the need for major house building, and these come with quite a few restrictions to be met.

 

Let’s not forget that the presumption is supposed to be “in favour of sustainable development”, as noted in the NPPF. That’s not necessarily the impression that comes across from every planning authority. Any revised NPPF will be key to setting the tone and we wait with anticipation to see how this comes to fruition.

 

What I think could assist in simplifying and improving the planning process is this:

• The reintroduction of early and one-to-one input from a planning officer on site to discuss the basic principle of development. This might wheedle-out applications that don’t have any legs, saving time and expense for all involved further down the line. The government has confirmed their intention to increase the number of planning officers, and this would certainly help.
• Could more of the detail of how the proposals will be built be placed within the building regulations remit rather than under the planning umbrella? I appreciate that the push has been to integrate planning and building regulations more fully, but I think this has become too heavily skewed in the direction of planning, and this ‘front-loading’ is creating the economic risk to projects. Perhaps we need a more staged and seamless approach that marries better with the RIBA stages?
• And, could we replace the planning committee with something more impartial and better informed? Having witnessed real travesties of justice at the hands of planning committees I can’t say that I would support their ongoing use. How can someone uneducated in the planning process overrule the Planning Officer’s decision and all the hard work and careful consultation carried out by a qualified team of people? This increases the number of appeals which again cost everyone time and money to undertake. When you consider that in the first quarter of 2024, 28% of appeals were successful, and hence should have been approved, it shows that something is going wrong and ultimately viable development is being impacted upon. Initial comments received from the Chancellor appear to acknowledge that this is an issue and that there will be greater accountability and the ability to ‘step-in’ should there be an obvious obstacle that shouldn’t exist.

 

From my personal perspective I think that planning should be far more objective and far less subjective. Design Review Panels were set up to provide completely unbiased, informed design comment to guide the Planning Officer on matters of urban design, materials, scale, massing, and the like. But, from personal experience, the Planning Officer can choose to ignore this advice if they wish, which surely makes a mockery of that process, other than ticking another box?

 

As Planning Officers have the skills and training, they should be making the decisions based on clearly written policy that favours sustainable development. An applicant should be able to challenge a decision quickly by requesting a second opinion without having to get caught up in a very lengthy and costly appeal process. I’m in favour of peer review via design review panels, but where appointed their input should be considered as overriding that of the planning officer.

 

The big issue that remains is still the degree and detail of information required to gain planning validation, let alone approval. This can be so costly and so lengthy and complex to achieve that it stops a potential application in its tracks. If we can better stage this information and gear its degree of detail to the scale of the proposals, this might just encourage more potential applicants to take the plunge, investors to take the risk and sites to be unlocked from planning oblivion.