Written evidence submitted by The Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA)(FLO0039)

May 2020

1. About the TCPA             

Founded in 1899, the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) is the UK’s oldest independent charity focused on planning and sustainable development. Through our work over the last century we have improved both the art and science of planning in the UK and abroad. The TCPA puts social justice and the environment at the heart of policy debate and seeks to inspire Government, industry and campaigners to take a fresh perspective on major issues, including planning policy, housing, regeneration and climate change. Our objectives are to:

• Secure a decent, well designed home for everyone, in a human-scale environment combining the best features of town and country;
• Empower people and communities to influence decisions that affect them;
• Improve the planning system in accordance with the principles of sustainable development

The TCPA has a strong track record in research, policy formulation and political influence on, among other things, climate adaptation and mitigation in the context of spatial planning (https://www.tcpa.org.uk/Pages/Category/energy-and-climate-change). This has been informed by a comprehensive body of knowledge supported by both UK research and a series of European-funded projects on adaptation, green infrastructure, human health and sustainable energy.

2. Summary

As a nation, we are critically unprepared for the impacts of climate change. This failure is partly about a lack of consistent political leadership but it is expressed in practical terms by a failure to organise ourselves to meet the scale of the climate challenge. The result is that as the climate crisis intensifies, we will be made poorer and more vulnerable than we need to be. The immediate objective of Government should be:

• To construct an effective framework to secure national resilience to climate impacts with an emphasis on delivery bodies with sufficient power and integrated responsibility to drive the necessary change.
• To develop the policy, legal and governance instruments to deliver this resilience and, in particular, to set down clear legal and policy standards.

2.1               Introduction

The TCPA’s expertise on the climate change crisis is focused on the land use planning system and specifically on strategic responses to the impact from flooding and other extreme weather events. It is not focused on the emergency planning and recovery phase from specific flood events. In section 2 this evidence sets out our background assumptions on the climate sciences and potential role of the planning system. Section 3 addresses questions 1, 3 and 5 of the terms of reference which are most relevant to our knowledge and section 4 sets out an alternative proposal for how to reform our strategic response to the climate crisis.

2.2               The Climate Crisis

The impacts of climate change are happening faster and with greater intensity than we expected. The nature of these impacts is focused upon increased severe weather including rain fall and heat waves and on increasing sea level rise. In practice this means our future will be defined by increased tidal, river and surface water flood events along with temperature spikes particularly in our urban areas.

One indicator of this problem is sea level rise.  We are now meant to be planning for 1.15 meters by 2100 on the east coast of England. Observable sea level rise has been happening faster than anticipated. A working average for sea level rise is now 5mm per annum, with worse to come as current Environment Agency estimates do not include the breakup of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, so estimates of sea level rise are likely to be revised upwards. Sea levels will go on rising after 2100 so the viability of places needs be seen in this long-term context[1].   

There is a limited prospect of stabilising global temperatures at 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, so while we must make radical carbon reduction now, we are locked into multiple and severe climate impacts.

2.3              The Adaptation Challenge

Radical decarbonisation is complex but because it involves defined sectors which have similar characteristics everywhere, like energy systems, it is more susceptible to a smaller number of nationally organised policy levers. Some of these, such as expansion of offshore wind have limited impacts on communities. In stark contrast adaptation requires the radical remaking of places and its impacts are much more variable and complex for four main reasons:

1. Place. One of our problems is that climate impacts play out very differently across the diverse physical and social geography of the UK. Urban and rural, upland and coastal areas all require different and fine grain responses.
2. People. Climate impacts impact on people in different ways and particularly on those social groups least equipped to be resilient. Adaptation solutions also have direct and lasting impacts on everyday lives so taking action means working with communities and communicating an effective narrative for change.
3. Economy. The failure to build effective resilience creates risk and increases the cost and even availability of insurance. Since insurance is the foundation of confident investment there can be multiple benefits to securing resilience and conversely multiple and severe economic impacts of not doing so.
4. Space. Building resilience requires interlocking measures from big spatial scale coastal realignment to the detail of the way buildings are wired. The interdependence of these decisions is vital in determining long term solutions and is often driven by catchments and coastal systems which do not fit with local government boundaries.
5. Time. Building resilience requires thinking about the very long term and at least 100-year planning horizons. This implies new ways of thinking and working. Time is also running out to begin building resilience so we need to act now and radically.

The test of current policy is whether it can deal with all of these factors together. The TCPA is clear that the UK’s current approach does not pass this test.

2.4              The role of the planning system in building climate resilience

The Raynsford Review of the English planning[2] set out in detail the evolution and current problems with the system. The central conclusion was that there is a major gap between current practice, which is more or less dysfunctional, and the actual potential of the system to deliver change. In the past, success has been defined by comprehensive planned solutions to managing dramatic change over short time periods with effective delivery models. The key point is that the planning system has the potential to manage data, construct plans and shape delivery in ways vital to securing long term solutions to flood risk. It has the potential to do this from detailed building scale measures right up to national strategic planning. The planning system remains the key gateway test in shaping the resilience of new development. 385,200 planning permissions were granted in the year ending June 2019 and there  were 213,600 new build completions in the year ending March 2019. Recent research by the Local Government Association[3] found that there are around 1 million unbuilt homes in the pipeline which have planning permission.

The evidence of how many other European nations take a more successful approach is clear and set out in the TCPA’s extensive EU research project program. Section 4 of this evidence explores in more detail how the current system could be strategically reformed. However, specific changes to planning policy and guidance now would make a significant difference to outcomes now. Specifically, there needs to be much greater prioritisation for climate change in planning decisions, greater clarity on policy standards, stronger support with skills on managing flood risk and the necessary resources to drive delivery.

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3.               Detailed response to the Terms of Reference

Question 1: Are the current national and local governance and coordination arrangements for flood and coastal risk management in England effective?

While the TCPA strongly supports the work of the Environment Agency, local government and other key partners critical to dealing with flood risk, their work is hindered and not facilitated by the way national government has chosen to organise our response to the climate crisis. As a result, we are badly organised to meet the strategic challenges of climate change.

There are five key areas of dysfunction.

1. Institutional fragmentation

There are multiple national and local agencies with a stake in adaptation but no single entity with oversight of the complete agenda.  As a result, there is no clear line of sight for either policy or delivery between the evidence of climate impacts and the national, regional and local delivery responses which are required.

National Arrangements

Defra is responsible for climate change including the National Adaptation Programme. However, Defra does not produce any form of spatial plans at the national strategic level. Instead, climate impacts are described thematically which are of little or no help in making practical decisions in communities.

The Environment Agency sits within the Defra family and includes the UK climate impacts programme which provides one of the key sources of climate impact data. The Environment Agency has a direct and vital role in delivering flood defence measures, although there is a separate question about whether these investment levels are adequate. The Environment Agency has no formal remit to deal with heat stress nor does it have responsibility for management of all aspects of flood risk. Most significantly, there is no single agency for the delivery of the multiple actions which are needed to build national resilience.

The Committee on Climate Change is also part of the Defra family. The Adaptation Sub Committee provides powerful evidence on the adaptation challenge but is not intended as a delivery mechanism. Defra, the Environment Agency and the ASC have an uneasy relationship with the key regulatory regimes necessary to affect change on the ground. These agencies are held by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), HM Treasury and the Department for Transport.

MHCLG control planning policy and set the direction of travel for local authorities which is overwhelmingly focused on housing growth. MHCLG do not have a significant team focused on climate change. MHCLG also control bodies such as Homes England and are responsible for local government in general.

Further key planning responsibilities sit directly with the Treasury who control the infrastructure projects through the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC). The NIC could have a powerful remit in national planning but their focus is on traditional infrastructure provision and they have no role in direct delivery. The plans they produced for areas such as the Oxford Cambridge Arc have no formal status in the Town and County planning regime. The Treasury has traditionally had a poor understanding of the economic costs of climate change and the economic benefits of building resilience as opposed to other infrastructure investment.

Sub-regional and local arrangements

There are a bewildering number of bodies with responsibilities for resilience in many parts of England. These include but are not limited to:

• The Environment Agency
• Natural England (Limited aspects of upland land management such as voluntary peat  restoration)
• Internal drainage boards
• Regional flood and coastal committees
• Local Enterprise Partnerships (Providing investment in some flood defence projects)
• County Councils/Unitary Councils (Lead Local Flood Authorities (LLFAs) and Highways)
• Water Utility Companies
• District Councils (the planning authority for housing)
• Parish Councils (preparation of Neighbourhood Plans)

Local planning authorities are the closest proxy we have with the powers to both plan and control development, yet their boundaries are very poorly aligned with the functional geography of, for example, flood risk. In the absence of any coherent strategic planning framework, cooperation between districts in similar areas of vulnerability is institutionally and politically difficult and, in some cases, non-existent.  Neither is there any unified approach to land use control with no control over, for example, upland land management. Voluntary approaches to key things like peatland restoration is neither effective enough nor integrated with single ‘line of sight’ across a whole catchment.

What emerges from this description of local and sub regional bodies is that we have a relatively sophisticated grasp of data but we lack a single and unified body capable of delivery across different regulatory regimes. As a result, the management of issues such as surface water flooding is complex and confused. The Environment Agency is confident that its advice is followed in vast majority of major decisions but has a much lass weaker ability to review minor applications of less than 10 units which make up the bulk of decisions. In 2019, there were 6,000 applications for major housing developments, and 39,000 applications for minor housing developments[4].

2. Austerity

Since 2010 a lack of resources has impacted severely on the skills and institutional capacity of all the key players relevant to building resilience. However, this is most acutely expressed in local planning authorities of top-tier flood authorities. The resources to develop and retain staff as well as commission relevant supporting evidence are inadequate.

3. Skills

There is a widespread lack of the key relevant adaptation skills, particularly in planning but also in the wider built environment sector in terms of design and construction.

4. Deregulation

Those on the front line of securing adaptation in local government have much less power over the built environment than they did a decade ago. The rapid expansion of Permitted Development is a key example of this, where commercial property can be converted to housing units without the need for full planning permission, nor are local authorities able  to insist on a wider range of adaptation measures in this instance.

5. Data handling

Greater certainty is required by local decision makers on how to apply data on future climate impacts. This is currently provided as a range of probable outcomes in relation to a range of carbon scenarios. This gives the appearance that there is a choice at the local level on what, for example, sea level rise factor a district council should be planning for. This is both complicated and dangerous since areas in the same subregion with similar geographic characteristics need to apply the data in a unified way. Government should prescribe reasonable worst-case scenarios for subregions which include clear benchmarks of future impacts to be applied to planning decisions. There is also an urgent need to ensure that the most up to date data on climate impact is being applied in planning decisions. Local plans are based on strategic flood risk assessments which take time to prepare . Local plans themselves may take a further five years to prepare. It is possible therefore, for a brand-new local plan to be based on flood risk data which has been superseded in updated flood risk allowances. Planning for the reasonable worst-case scenario should be applied to create a precautionary approach seeking to avoid locations for development which are at risk now and will be at risk in the future. Such an approach should ensure that design measures necessary to secure the resilience of property up to 2100 are incorporated from the beginning of the development process. This should be delivered to strengthen the adaptive capacity of new and existing development.

Question 2: What lessons can be learned from the recent floods about the way Government and local authorities respond to flooding events? 

The TCPA believes that there is a clear case for the wholesale reform of our approach to flood risk and these measures are set out in Section 4 of this evidence. There is also a need to urgently reconsider our national approach to infrastructure provision. This requires a shift of focus on building resilience of existing places and infrastructure before embarking on new provision. We also strongly support the adoption of national resilience measures of kind set out in the Environment Agency[5].

Question 4: How can communities most effectively be involved, and supported, in the policies and decisions that affect them? 

Progress on meeting the climate challenge requires a national effort but many actions require the mobilization and empowerment of communities who are best placed to understand how solutions can be applied. The Raynsford Review[6], as well as the TCPA’s work with organisations such as the National Flood Forum, indicate a major breakdown of trust between people and planning. Much greater support is needed for communities to actively engage in the local plan process and more guidance is required on how neighbourhood plans can have a stronger focus on climate adaptation. This needs to be accompanied by the return of powers to local authorities and communities which have been centralised. These include powers to control the conversion of buildings to residential use.

Question 5: With increasing focus on natural flood management measures, how should future agricultural and environmental policies be focussed and integrated with the Government’s wider approach to flood risk? 

Section 4 sets out how the TCPA believes upland land management should be brought inside the planning regime.

Question 6: How can housing and other development be made more resilient to flooding, and what role can be played by measures such as insurance, sustainable drainage and planning policy? 

The TCPA campaigns for a number of changes that will enable the planning system to meet its potential, specifically in relation to building the nation’s resilience to the climate crisis. There is consensus from communities, local government and the insurance industry that our current approach to dealing with the climate challenge is flawed. In particular, a lack of skills and resources, overlapping responsibilities between different government agencies and departments and a lack of political leadership are contributing to a sense of uncertainty. While the direct impacts of climate change are damaging many vulnerable communities, this uncertainty is impacting on their economic future.

Planning has the proven capacity to build lasting resilience. It can implement local measures such as sustainable urban drainage and secure development which is intrinsically resilience by design. But it can do far more than that. Planning could also provide a strategic framework to deal with the impact of at least 1.5m of sea level rise by 2100.

As outlined in the introduction to this submission, the planning system is not fulfilling its potential to address the climate challenge. This is for three primary reasons:

1. National planning policy does not place action on climate change as a central priority.
2. The need for urgent investment in the skills and capacity of local government.
3. The UK does not have an effective national organisation to deal with the scale of climate challenge.

National planning policy on areas at risk of flooding does need to be more prescriptive and detailed to take account of the lack of resources at the local level. There should be a clear presumption against development in locations at risk now or likely to be at risk over the time scales identified in Environment Agency (EA) allowances. This presumption should replace the current sequential test. Exceptions to presumption would only be allowed which could meet the very high standards of resilience required and these standards should be set out prescriptively in national policy. This would drive increased certainty for communities and developers. There is also the need for more clarity on data handling and particularly the problem of out of date information from SFRA’s then informing local plans. Given the complexity of the data there is a need for much clearer rules of thumb, for example always planning for the reasonable worst-case scenarios in applying estimates of flood risk and coastal change. Rather than giving a range of possible outcomes for factors such as sea level, the EA should make clear a common reasonable worst case scenario so that local plans, such as those for the east coast, are all planning for the same figure by 2100.

In order to address the longer-term, strategic impacts of climate change, the TCPA, along with other partners, has produced a framework for managing strategic national change over the medium term in our most vulnerable places based on the introduction of Resilience Development Corporations (RDCs).

In section 4 of this submission we have introduced the TCPA’s thinking behind this proposal and begun to explore how such bodies might operate.

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4. Building the Strategic resilience:  the case for a National Resilience Act

Introduction

Securing the transformative change with the rapidity that the science implies[7] a creative reconsideration of the basis of how the nation manages the climate crisis is needed. The most successful model we have for delivering the kind of complex change in a very short time scale lies in the immediate post war experience of managing land and development. A detailed examination of this history illustrates how rapid change was made possible. The most striking example of this experience was the development of the post war new town development corporations. These bodies were designed to manage large scale demographic change and reconstruction in an era of acute housing shortage. They were designed to both deliver numbers and quality and inclusive communities at the same time.

The record of these corporations is impressive. 32 new towns were built in a designation process that lasted from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. These places were delivered at scale in a very short time and now house 2.8 million people. They provide rich learning and many mistakes were made, but in essence the genius of the development corporations was to create a public body as master developer with a wide range of powers to do everything necessary to deliver the town. This was set in the context of national financial support which, because of the ability of the corporations to capture land values, proved to be one of the most profitable public interventions in post war history. There continues to be an active debate in government about the application of development corporations for regeneration and housing growth but their potential to deal with environmental crisis has largely been ignored.

What’s the core of our solution? A National Resilience Act, creating Resilience Development Corporations

The TCPA’s central proposal is to take the framework of a Development Corporation and repurpose it to provide a strong planning delivery mechanism for building resilience in specific places. Each Resilience Development Corporation (RDC) would have a clear founding purpose and legal power to do everything necessary to secure the resilience of a particular locality. Unlike the new towns, each designation would be based on an area of functional geography that shared key vulnerabilities and where joint planning and delivery had added benefits. The process of designating such corporations would require both parliamentary consent, a public inquiry and the approval of the Secretary of State. Responsibility and backing for the RDCs themselves would remain a function of central government.

This would require creating a modified legal framework based on the new town’s legislation. This creates an opportunity to modernise these development corporations in order to reflect the importance of community participation, long term sustainable development and clear and specific goals on climate adaptation and mitigation. Inside each designation the RDC would have powers to plan and control development and compulsory purchase land as well as be able to implement resilience measures in terms of flood defence and building standards. Their scope might include upland land management where this directly relates to managing flood or reducing carbon by protecting and enhancing carbon sinks.

It would not be intended to replace all the planning functions of the local government but it would remove a significant element of their power. It is important to note, however, that the RDCs are intended as an idea to be layered over the top of existing structures, unifying and coordinating their powers where these are related to climate resilience. Initially the following areas are suggested for RDCs in England (see Figure 1):

• the Humber to the Wash (including the River Don Catchment);
• the Wash to the Thames;
• Portsmouth and Southampton;
• the Somerset levels and the Severn estuary;
• the South Pennines between Manchester and Leeds/Bradford;
• Blackpool and the Lancashire coast.
• Cumbria

Figure 1 Map of proposed locations for Resilience Development Corporations

The board membership of the RDC would need to reflect existing institutions such as the Environment Agency as well as the voice of communities. Each RDC would have a fixed life depending on the scale of the challenge in a locality and would eventually be wound up, with planning powers being returned to local authorities.

The idea of an RDC acting as ‘master developer’, working with existing institutions in a coordinated way, is a powerful incentive for local authorities to agree to such a proposal. It would provide a more effective and efficient way of driving change so long as the power of the RDC was balanced with new opportunities for genuine participative governance. Such proposals are not intended to win a popularity contest and would only be acceptable if they could demonstrate how they could secure the long-term future of communities. Above all they would provide the community with certainty about their own future and give investors and insurers  the confidence to continue to invest and support vulnerable places over the long term.

A National Resilience Act would provide for the establishment of RDCs and provide for the detail of their designation, operation and governance. The Act would place duties on Ministers to prepare national policy to support the Corporations. It would be accompanied either in law or policy with the establishment of a Department for Climate Resilience to unify all those functions necessary for national resilience which are currently spread across government departments. Finally, the Act would amend the statutory basis of the Environment Agency to give an overall technical responsibility on climate adaptation including heat stress.

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