“Tear it down and start again” - re-shuffles & the slow death of English planning reform
Starter for 10. Fingers on those buzzers, please. Which starry-eyed reformer of the English planning system wrote…
“the planning system is showing its age. What was once an innovative emphasis on consultation has now become a set of inflexible, legalistic and bureaucratic procedures. A system that was intended to promote development now blocks it. Business complains that the speed of decision is undermining productivity and competitiveness. People feel they are not sufficiently involved in decisions that affect their lives. So it is time for change. We need good planning to deliver sustainable development, to harness growth to build a better future. We need a better, simpler, faster, more accessible system that serves both business and the community.”
Bojo? ❌ Robert Jenrick (we hardly knew ye)? ❌ Jack Airey? ❌ No, siree. 10 points to everyone who said the Right Honourable Stephen Byers MP, Tony Blair’s Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government & the Regions after the 2001 general election. Writing the foreword to the 2001 Green Paper “Delivering a Fundamental Change”. Sure, it’s 20 years old now (topping the charts was the Stereophonics lovely cover of Rod Stewart’s “Handbags and Gladrags” - anthem to all Office fans everywhere). Anyway, the Green Paper’s worth a scan and you’ll see the songs that government was singing about the ills of the planning system follow a familiar tune. No public confidence. Too slow. Too bureaucratic. Too expensive. LPAs over-stretched and under-resourced. Policies too long and diffuse. You know the score.
So many of the points are correct. So much of the criticism well founded. Those of us who toil away in this system day in, day out see what a slow, unpredictable, expensive mess it can all turn into. But as avid viewers of House will remember: coming up with the diagnosis is only half the game. You also need to find a cure. The 2004 Act which emerged from the 2001 Green Paper did not, I fear, deliver the fundamental change Blair’s Government was after.
Anyway, you know what’s happened since then. To cut a loooooooong story short: In 2010 the Government promised to revolutionise the planning system through the Localism Act. In 2012, Greg Clarke and David Cameron tried to fix a system which is “too complicated, too costly, too uncertain” to “help build the homes the next generation needs” by compressing national policy into a single document. That was supposed to move us on from development which is “mediocre, insensitive and has detracted from the character of the areas in which we live and work”. Did it work? Well, you be the judge: in 2017, Theresa May and Sajid Javid thought the housing market was broken enough to need fixing. Sajid Javid’s foreword to that White Paper has become painfully ironic:
“Over the years, the response from politicians has been piecemeal. Well-intentioned initiatives have built more homes here and there but have skirted around the edges of a growing problem.”
Scroll down to 2020. Another White Paper. This time, Boris told us, we’d be in for:
“Radical reform unlike anything we have seen since the Second World War.
Not more fiddling around the edges, not simply painting over the damp patches, but levelling the foundations and building, from the ground up, a whole new planning system for England.”
Well over a year later, and what do we know? Well, nothing really. But what do we think we know. We think we know that:
The key bits of the White Paper - the “zoning” stuff I summarised here, and the mandatory housing targets I wrote about here - are to be ditched in response to persistent back-bench rumblings I talked about here (including from no less than Theresa May who has, since leaving post as PM, decided that the housing market doesn’t need so much fixing any more. Happy days).
Robert Jenrick’s also gone (along with another of the White Paper’s visionaries - Dominic Cummings).
Which means that the long-promised “Autumn” response to the White Paper is… looking doubtful. And the Planning Bill itself. Will we ever see it? What on earth will it say? 🤷♂️.
We have - shortly before Mr Jenrick exited stage left - been told that the Bill is going to include the Policy Exchange’s proposal for street-by-street plans. OK. It may be marvellous - we’ll see. But but but…
Do you remember the West Wing episode “Shibboleth”? It’s a classic. Obviously. Which comes right the middle of that masterly season 2 when the show was at the height of its powers. President Bartlett tells his staff that a “shibboleth” was a password used to distinguish true Israelites from impostors. When the President meets an asylum-seeker who claims to be fleeing religious persecution, Bartlett puts his faith to the test. He asks him to name the 12 disciples. The refugee names them, but then points out that “faith is the true shibboleth”. You can watch it all here. Please do.
As I write this, we don’t know who the next Minister is for Housing, Communities and Local Government. So we’ll see. But whoever they are, if you want to test if they’re really interested in moving the system forward… if you want to know if they’ll be able to stand up to the back-benchers and get something done… then here’s my shibboleth. Don’t focus on Green Belt reform (because there won’t be any), beauty, levelling up, mutant algorithms, automatic planning permissions or zoning. Focus on 2 simple things:
Will they replace the duty to cooperate with a strategic tier of planning governance which deals with cross-boundary planning issues - as I discussed here; and
Will they require local authorities to deliver housing numbers fixed from above - either nationally (as suggested in last year’s White Paper) or through that strategic tier of planning (which very much was not suggested in the White Paper) - see what I said about this here.
That’s it, folks. That’s my shibboleth. If the new minister’s solution to righting the wrongs of the English planning system doesn’t deal with (1) or (2), then I’ve a prediction for you: we can add the next attempt to reform the planning system to the bonfire of the vanities which have preceded it over the last 30 years.
Farewell, Mr Jenrick. Stay well, #planoraks. And - best as you can through all of this madness - try to #keeponplanning.
