By Colin Wiles, housing consultant.

Planning reform has been a constant in government thinking over the past ten years. If only, the thinking seems to go, the process was simpler, faster, and less bureaucratic then it would deliver the homes and places we need.

It often seems that the planning system is to blame
for all our problems, never mind the failure to invest in social housing, or to tackle the dysfunctional housing and land market, or the broken housebuilding industry.

Now they are at it again. A white paper on planning was due earlier this year but has been delayed due to the coronavirus crisis. But the government published a policy paper in March with a taster of what might come.

It set out some broad objectives about “supporting communities to deliver more homes for local people” (local homes for local people?), “helping first time buyers onto the housing ladder, creating beautiful, sustainable places, and providing affordable, safe and secure housing for all” as well as “affordable, green and beautiful homes for everyone”. It sounds like quite a wish list!

Yet over the last ten years planning departments have seen funding cuts of over 50%, and strategic planning has been side-lined. I sit on the planning committee of my town council and the district council’s land use plan proposes that a huge swathe of agricultural land between the town centre and the bypass should be developed.

It is larger than the historic core of the town and yet there is no master plan, no strategy, no vision. So it will be developed piecemeal without any thought to infrastructure, schools, community facilities, or the wider benefits to the town that could be achieved by smart planning. The result will be a dog’s dinner, a situation that is being replicated all over the country, where only about 40% of local authorities have an up to date local plan.

Robert Jenrick says he wants to re-think the planning system “from first principles” and that “The time has come to speed up and simplify this country’s overly bureaucratic planning process”.

There are reports that this will include plans for zoning, so that local spatial plans will include “zoned” areas within which development will be allowed to proceed without the need for detailed planning permission, so long as it follows the broad zoning rules. There will also be fast track planning for “beautiful” buildings. There are also reports that the rules on green belt development will be relaxed, something that I welcome very much. I have been writing about this for years.

The Beautiful Buildings Commission has been one recent influence on government thought. I wrote about them here. But the government’s favourite think tank, Policy Exchange, has been the biggest driver of this change.

In their latest publication, Rethinking the Planning System for the 21st Century, they repeat their calls for a radical overhaul of planning, basically to destroy the system that was created in 1947 when the right to develop land was effectively nationalised.

I am not overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of zoning. After all, the Garden Cities and new towns were designed on this principle, with zones laid out for business, housing, leisure, schools etc. Milton Keynes follows the same pattern. But it needs to be flexible, as there is
plenty of evidence showing the benefits of mixed-use developments, where small scale offices, artisan workshops, and live-work units are inserted with sensitivity into residential areas, so that people do not have to travel far to work.

But the danger of a planning white paper at this stage is that it could seek to shape a world that no longer exists, post Covid-19. For example, millions of square feet of office space are likely to become redundant as companies switch to homeworking, and with more retail going
online thousands of shops could also be left vacant.

There could also be a flight from the major cities to more rural locations. Likewise, homes will need to be bigger and better adapted to homeworking and self-isolation.

What better use is there for all that spare office and retail space than to convert it to residential? It could help to revitalise town centres apart from anything, but it will need to be done to a high standard and not through the disastrous policy of Permitted Development Rights, which has created so many sub-standard homes. When the Coronavirus Public Inquiry is launched I do hope that the chronic state of our housing stock will be a major item on the agenda.

This brings me back to local democracy and scrutiny of planning applications. There are fears that the “streamlined” planning system will side-line local politicians, and that many major schemes will not be subject to any democratic input at all.

Indeed, Policy Exchange is explicit on this. They recommend that local politicians should only have a role in rubberstamping national policies and be given no say over schemes that conform with the general zoning policies put in place locally. They state (see page 12): “They
(councillors) should have no say over deciding applications for new developments – this should be a purely administrative exercise checking the proposal conforms to local rules.”

This is a dangerous path to go down I feel. For all their faults, and despite the dangers of nimbyism, local councillors can act as a conduit through which people can input their views into the planning system.

What we need is more local democracy, not less, so that people can come to informed and unbiased decisions about the need for new homes in their area and be encouraged to support the sustainable growth of their communities.