🏆 The #Planoraks 2023 - worst planning reform of the year 🏆
Chestnuts roasting on some open fires - up and down our cold, wet, grey and largely snowless land. Here we are as in olden days. It’s mid-December. And you’ll have sensed it. Twinkling lights on the high streets. Something special in the air. The Michael Bublé Christmas album solidly on repeat (at least in our household) morning, noon and night. It can only mean only one thing: it’s award season, folks. So, just like every year, unfurl the very poshest of your posh frocks. Polish those shoes until they sparkle. Straighten those bow-ties. For the biggest night in the business. [Drumroll purrrlease.…] It’s the 4th annual #Planorak awards.
[Pause for applause, Ed.]
Now. I know we say this every time, but… what a year it’s been. Seriously. The judges have been swamped. The competition for the big gongs fiercer than ever. But it’s lonely at the top. And there can only ever be 1 winner of the biggest prize in town - the much-coveted “worst planning reform of the year” award. Still, there’s more to life than winning. We should give shout-outs to all the nominees, because one thing’s for sure. The raft of cynicism, cowardice, indolence, short-termism, self-intererst and petty politicking in 2023 will take some matching. It really will.
But enough small-talk. Let’s get into it: in the end, friends, there was only going to be one winner. Truth be told, it was a landslide. The judges were unanimous. Pass me the envelope, please. Thank you. The 2023 award for worst planning reform is […] paragraph 142 of the so-we’re-told-soon-to-be-published NPPF. 🥳. Remember that? It’s the policy which is to tell us that “Green Belt boundaries are not required to be reviewed and altered if this would be the only means of meeting the objectively assessed need for housing over the plan period.”
Now, to state the obvious, almost a year into the most tedious consultation period in living memory, the new NPPF still isn’t out yet! It’s coming next week apparently, but possibly not until as late as 22nd December. But I’m sorry folks - these awards can’t wait that long, and I’m very much hoping come 22nd December you’ll have more festive things to think about than planning reform. Which means we have to take a risk, and assume that Mr Gove was telling the truth when he suggested to the Select Committee last week (and the repeated press briefings since then) that the new NPPF will be, at least on this topic, as per the consultation version which this blog a little hot-headedly described in January as “So small-minded. So weak. It’s pathetic.” To be fair, I wasn’t alone. The Times has just described this year’s award-winner as “a death warrant” for the Government, “social and economic vandalism”, “a chokehold on economic growth”, an “insult to the intelligence of the electorate” and “a matter of era-defining shame for the Conservatives”. 😬.
Still, the judges were wowed. So… well done in advance to everyone involved - you should be proud. What a corker.
Why, some of you may be wondering, has this policy been singled out from such a very strong field of bad policies to reap the highest reward in the biz? Well, the judges have given us 6 big reasons - if you’re sitting comfortably:
It’s pointless
Green Belt boundaries are (obviously) already not “required” to be redrawn to accommodate needs for housing, or for anything else.
Whether boundaries are changed or not is something for the authority to consider against the test of “exceptional circumstances” which I talked about here. Meeting different kinds of needs, e.g. for housing, may amount to an exceptional circumstance to release land from the Green Belt. It may not. Whether it does, and whether to amend boundaries or not, is a question for the local planning authority, and for the inspector examining the plan.
So in short: authorities can amend boundaries to meet needs. But they are not required to.
Here’s the kicker: that was the position under the old system (i.e. under the current NPPF). And it’ll still be the position under the new NPPF. To be fair, the Government itself acknowledges this non-change in its slightly frenzied non-response to the Times leader I link to above where it summarises the big change as simply “clarifying that Green Belt boundaries are not required to be reviewed and altered by local authorities - but that they can still choose to do so where they can evidence that this is warranted.”
But hang on - we’re just clarifying the existing situation? What, then, is the point of all the fanfare?
Well, what really impressed our judges was the Government’s (successful) attempt to score pre-election headlines (though not, perhaps, all quite the headlines it was hoping for) and fan confusion up and down the land. Confusion which is going to cost us. All of us. See point 2.
It’ll cost us over 30,000 homes a year
Almost two thirds of local planning authorities have at least some areas of Green Belt. Even though this new policy doesn’t actually change anything (see point 1), the “message” the Government appears to be trying to send these authorities is something along the lines of “don’t worry too much about trying to meet your housing needs”.
That will mean that plans become less ambitious (this isn’t speculation - it’s already been happening in emerging plans all over the country for a couple of years now in anticipation of next week’s grand capitulation) at a time when we need the ambition of plans and of planners more than ever. A lack of ambition will have - and has already had - all kinds of awful effects. Including, of course, the inevitability that we will deliver fewer homes. Many, many, many fewer homes. Which is just the tonic to solve the deteriorating housing crisis which, as the National Housing Federation recently explained, is going see by 2045 (a) the number of children living in temporary accommodation rising by hundreds of thousands, (b) social housing lists doubling, (c) almost 6 million households paying at least 1/3 of their income on housing, (d) homelessness accelerating and (e) 2.3 million people living in poorly suited homes, with a 350,000 home shortfall of retirement and supported housing. We can, obviously, kiss that still-somehow-maintained 300,000 homes a year target goodbye. That ship sails with our new NPPF. Farewell.
Taken together with the other proposed NPPF reforms, Lichfields’ earlier estimate was that this would lead to a total total hit to the economy of around £34bn, and 386,000 fewer jobs. Luckily, the economy’s in such excellent shape at the moment that I’m sure we can afford to lose a few jobs here and there.
Planners don’t support it
But it gets better. Because this policy isn’t only pointless. And harmful. It’s also wildly unpopular - at least among those who are actually qualified to understand what its impacts will be, and those who will be charged with trying to implement it.
You might assume - and you’d be right - that the development industry was unanimously against this reform. But they aren’t the only ones. As I talked about here, in responding to the NPPF consultation, the RTPI told us that Green Belt reviews at a strategic level are important for them to serve their purposes, and that the Government’s proposal would inevitably have a negative impact on housing affordability. The Planning Officers Society agreed - it told us that the change will have “significant unintended consequences” in terms of housing delivery, would create “tensions” with non-Green Belt authorities and would make it “likely the Government will fail to meet its housing target”.
But, you know what - our Government’s had it up to here with so-called “experts” giving it accurate forecasts of why it’s bad ideas won’t work. And quite right too.
It’s unnecessary
You’d almost think the Green Belt was a victim that needed saving. Not a bit of it. The threat to the nation’s Green Belt has reached such dire proportions that its size has increased (again) by 860 hectares this year, on top of the almost 25,000 hectare increase last year. The Green Belt is the largest it’s been in at least 20 years. All of which has been achieved without our pointless, harmful, award-winning new policy.
It’s a recipe for stagnation
Of course, change - in the form of new development - brings challenges. It’s the role of the planning system to balance and manage some of those challenges. What’s worse than taking on those challenges? Not taking them on. Stagnation. Drawing up the drawbridge. Planning not for the future, but to freeze ourselves into the past. Think of it: most of the world’s great settlements simply wouldn’t exist unless brave folks had decided to build “at densities significantly out of character with the existing area” At the same time, in large swathes of England which are almost entirely washed over by the Green Belt, a decision not even to review Green Belt boundaries as part of a local plan review to accommodate new homes is, in effect, a decision to stop growing altogether. A moratorium on growth - all happening on the fringes of our most sustainable towns and cities. Is this really what we’re reduced to? Not even trying anymore?
Lots of Green Belt boundaries haven’t been reviewed in over half a century. In a totally different legal and policy framework. They were designed to accommodate the requirements of a different generation - the post-war baby boomers. And the message to the children and grandchildren of that cohort is that we all - decades later - should shut up and get on with it. Want a home in our capital city? Well, stop moaning and get on with saving or borrowing 14 times your annual income. How hard can it be. (Pretty hard it turns out - this month the Policy Exchange have confirmed what I think all of us know, i.e. that “homeownership is virtually impossible for anyone who does not inherit a considerable amount of wealth, or is earning many times the median wage”. Housing is, they say, “rapidly becoming the preserve of the richest in society”.)
And why? To bolster our environment? To enhance our biodiversity? To protect our most valued landscapes? Nope. Nah. Wrong. We’re doing all this, risking all of this, losing all of this simply in order to keep land around our most sustainable towns and cities “open” to limit post-war urban “sprawl” (aka new houses on the edge of towns and cities). Land which was not designated for any special qualities or beauty or anything else. Beyond being “open”. As you’ll know, opinions differ on this topic (😬). But I for one say thank heavens we have a Government prepared to protect us from the scourge of sustainably located growth.
It’s all politics, no policy
All of the above is to say that articles like this one from that high custodian of truth, the Daily Mail - just the kind of nonsense the Government was hoping for with this vapid surrender of a policy - are wrong on almost every front.
Just to take some of the larger errors in the article’s first few sentences (a) it’s completely misleading to conflate the Green Belt with “England’s green and pleasant land” (the article, obviously couldn’t care less - it pictures what it calls “delightful English fields” surrounding Milborne Port in Somerset, a village which 40 miles away from the nearest Green Belt - but who’s counting) (b) the Green Belt won’t be “saved” by this policy - it’s thriving already without the policy, (c) councils already are not “forced” to release Green Belt to meet housing needs, (d) the new system has nothing to do with “communities taking back control” (why oh why do they love that phrase so much) - on the contrary, the Levelling Up Act contains at its heart the biggest centralised power grab in the English planning system since the 2nd world war.
But do you know - even mired in all the nonsense, the Mail piece gets one thing absolutely spot on:
“the move will likely quell pressure from rebel Conservative MPs who fear losing their seat at the next election if they don't stop plans to build new homes on the Green Belt.”
There we have it. The bit you’re not supposed to say out loud. And that, friends, is what really sealed the deal for this most woeful of policies. Its naked political opportunism.
Of course, other judges praised the policy’s lack of any coherent vision, the inexplicable and damaging delay in bringing it forward a full year after consultation began, the delays this will cause and has already caused to so many desperately needed local plans, its obvious conflict with the Government’s wider strategy of (so it says) boosting house-building, and its lack of support with a review of what the Green Belt is actually for. But, I mean. We haven’t got all night.
A noble winner indeed! Congratulations. For more nominations, and indeed more big gongs being handed out, listen up for the now-sort-of-becoming-annual #Planorak awards 50 Shades of Planning Podcast with Samuel Stafford and me, where all will be revealed… Later (we hope) this month! What better way to round out 2023. Available in all of your favourite podcasting venues.
And if I don’t see you - both me and the entire judging panel wish you and yours a very happy, healthy holiday season, and a wonderful beginning to 2024. Re-charge those batteries #planoraks. We’re going to need you next year. And every ounce of your creativity, determination, ambition and skill. More than ever. These are dark days. But for now, the best we can do is to pull open those Christmas crackers, fall asleep after lunch wearing our paper crowns and, most of all, through all the mess, try your level best to #keeponplanning.
Stay well, #planoraks! Merry Christmas. And happy new year.
