Written evidence submitted by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) [PRO 004]

1.0              About the TCPA

1.1              The Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) is an independent charity working to improve the art and science of town and country planning. The TCPA puts social justice and the environment at the heart of policy debate and inspires 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

2.0              2015 Priorities

2.1              The TCPA welcomes the Select Committee’s timely inquiry into ‘Fixing the Foundations’ and believes that it is necessary for the Government to be challenged and held to account on the basis of current evidence.

2.2              The TCPA includes an initial analysis as an appendix to this submission but highlights findings and recommendations in its ‘The Future of Planning and Place-Making’ report in March 2015. It concludes by recommending that “In thinking about the objectives of the planning system, the new Government should above all focus on developing a vision for the future of England that has a strong sense of direction and purpose, underpinned by an integrated framework for our future sustainable development. In reaching for this goal, the incoming Government must, as far as possible, seek consensus between the public, private and voluntary sectors.”

2.3              The TCPA recommends the Select Committee put forward the following question to the Planning Minister:

• Question 1: When considering proposals for a fundamental shift away the foundations of the planning system, why the HM Treasury did not take account of the evidence of the positive benefits of planning which the Communities and Local Government Select Committee and other Parliamentary Committees such as the Environmental Audit Committee have set out in reports from previous inquiries?

• Question 2: What is the evidence base, in terms of the learning and research, which has informed proposals for introducing a zoning system for housing developments on brownfield land?

Annex: TCPA Analysis of Fixing the Foundations

1. Introduction

On the 10th of July the Government published ‘Fixing the foundations: creating a more prosperous nation.’[1] This HMT document sets out the course of further planning and housing reform which will be implemented by three pieces of legislation and by further policy reform. The paper is significant to the Association not simply for the precise policy measures it contains, but because it signals a strong continued commitment to a deregulatory agenda based on an overarching analysis that planning is anti-competitive. The Government has been presented with extensive evidence of the benefits of planning to long-term place-making and well-being, as well as economic efficiency. In practice HMT has chosen to ignore these arguments and the evidence behind them.  There is not a single reference to, for example, the extensive data on health and the built environment in the paper. The following note provides some initial commentary on the proposals, but it also attempts to set these measures in the wider context of planning reform since 2010.

The TCPA is uniquely placed to give this bigger picture and longer term analysis and to ask whether the current planning system is fit for purpose given our organisational objectives.  As a starting provocation it now seems that, taken together with the new proposals, the Government has systematically undermined, and in some cases removed, the key pillars of the 1947 planning system.  It is not yet clear what kind of system HMT intends to replace it with although officials are clearly attracted to ‘zonal planning’.  Neither is it clear what role DCLG might play in shaping a new system since they were not a co-sponsor of the paper. The TCPA needs to consider how far it should seek to defend the principles of the English planning system and how far it should begin to frame a new campaign for a new form of democratic planning.

2. Planning reform: the story so far…

In March 2015 the TCPA published the ‘Future of planning and place making’[2] which concluded that the English planning system was not fit for purpose and required urgent attention to secure clear progressive objectives and a logical structure which reflected, at least in some way, the functional geography of England.  The paper concluded that England had:

• No effective national spatial planning with consequent lost opportunities to coordinate housing and infrastructure
• A profoundly dysfunctional sub-national planning framework with the abolition of regional planning and consequent data and a Duty to Cooperate which even where it was successful in its own terms did not deliver the benefits of strategic planning
• A non-spatial National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) which deprioritised place making, affordability, equality and inclusion and prioritised the needs of developers and landowners
• A local plan process which because of inherent flaws in national policy led to legal uncertainty and increased levels of successful appeals.
• A demoralised and chronically under resourced planning service

It is of course still the case that this and previous administrations have chosen not to use the New Towns Acts or to deal effectively with betterment taxation or the compensation code.

Over the past 12 months the Government made further changes to planning including:

• Delivering an effective moratorium on onshore wind. This major policy change was delivered by amending the Planning Practice Guidance (PPG) rather than the NPPF which both confuses the coherence of the two documents but allowed the change to happen without consultation[3],
• Making permanent changes to permitted development,
• Announcing review of CIL,
• The Vacant Property Credit, and
• Small site exemption from Section 106 contributions.

3. The direction of reform for the next five years

‘Fixing the foundations: creating a more prosperous nation’ sets out a strong platform for further extensive reform of the planning system in England. The paper repeats the analysis of both Professor Michael Ball and Professor Paul Cheshire as to the costs of the planning process on the UK economy.  Paragraph 9.4 states:

‘An excessively strict planning system can prevent land and other resources from being used efficiently, impeding productivity by:

• increasing the cost and uncertainty of investment. Previous estimates have put transaction costs for major housing developments at £3 billion per annum
• hindering competition by raising barriers to entry, adaptation and expansion
• constraining the agglomeration of firms and the mobility of labour, with previous estimates suggesting that planning constraints on commercial space are the equivalent of a 250% regulatory tax on office space
• encouraging firms, households and financial institutions to speculate on land, diverting resources away from productive activities

The paper cannot demonstrate actual evidence for these assertions which are based on academic estimates nor does it define what an ‘excessively strict’ system might mean. The paper shows no awareness of the counter arguments or data and research. Despite the evidence compiled by the RTPI or the growing and weighty evidence on the health and climate change benefits of measures taken in the built environment.[4] The paper has no regard for the benefits of planning to the economy and society and makes no attempt to quantify them. As a piece of economic analysis into the utility of public policy it is, therefore, deeply flawed and the policy conclusions are not based on a rigorous analysis of the evidence. This is important because the partial nature of the analysis suggests a continuation of ideological rather than evidential line from HMT. As a result any response based solely on rational evidence is unlikely to gain much traction. It is clear for example that despite intense engagement across the last Government on the benefits of planning none of the key messages seem to have had any effect. This ideological position will undoubtedly go on driving reforms beyond those currently on the table and remains our greatest barrier to securing the Association’s objectives of a progressive and efficient planning system.

The HMT paper makes a series of detailed policy recommendations for housing and planning as follows.

Housing:

• to enable the extension of Right to Buy levels of discount to housing association tenants
• to require local authorities to dispose of high-value vacant council houses which would help fund the Right to Buy extension discounts and the building of more affordable homes in the area
• to provide the necessary statutory framework to support the delivery of Starter Homes
• to take forward the Right to Build, requiring local planning authorities to support custom and self-builders registered in their area in identifying suitable plots of land to build or commission their own home
• to introduce a statutory register for brownfield land, to help achieve the target of getting Local Development Orders in place on 90% of suitable brownfield sites by 2020

Planning:

• to simplify and speed up the neighborhood planning system, to support communities that seek to meet local housing and other development needs through neighbourhood planning
• Streamline the local plan process in a system as unspecified way
• Allow the NSIP regime to deal with housing related applications
• Introducing ‘zonal style’ planning for brownfield development.
• Ending the commitment to Zero Carbon homes
• to give effect to other changes to housing and planning legislation that would support housing growth
• Wind energy over 50Megawatts will be taken out of the 2008 major infrastructure regime and given back to local planning
• Devolution of planning powers to CA mayors and including possible power to establish development corporations

Some of the impacts of these measures are immediate and dramatic such as the abandonment of the commitment to zero carbon homes in relation to climate change targets and the green technology sector.[5]  Other measures are yet to be defined such as ‘streamlining’ of the Local Plan process. The real concern here is that Government will remove key stages of the preparation process which are not themselves the cause of ‘delay’ and ignore the root cause of inefficiency which is resources, policy uncertainty and political will. The outcome might be a reduction in community participation at precisely the time when it needs to be expanded.  Devolution of planning powers to Combined Authorities is welcome and subject to a separate TCPA note but it is significant that the legislation which came out of the Lords in July contains nothing on devolved planning powers for Combined Authorities.

The changes to NSIP regime to take out onshore wind above 50 megawatt, reinforces a longer term trend to blur the lines of NSIP regime with the town and country planning regime.  A system in which major energy technologies are removed but new forms of commercial and leisure development are included without any supporting National Policy Statements (NPS) demonstrates a lack of coherence and logic. The degree to which housing now becomes part of the NSIP regime raises an even bigger question. The Association formed a clear view in our publication ‘New Towns Act 2015’ that the 2008 NSIP process was not an appropriate regime for the approval of scale housing growth primarily because it had been designed specifically with individual pieces of infrastructure in mind and was not best suited of long-term place-making.  It did not provide for development corporations and did not provide for an active role for local authorities or communities in the decision making process.  Any attempt to include housing in 2008 framework would require much more detail investigation not least the scope and specificity of a Housing NPS.

Single consent regimes and Zonal planning

There has been considerable speculation that DCLG would introduce a single consent regime for housing based on a zonal style system whereby site designation in a plan conferred final development consent.  The HMT paper states at paragraph 9.14 ‘Previous studies have found that the country’s planning system – where development proposals require individual planning permission and are subject to detailed and discretionary scrutiny – can create the sort of “slow, expensive and uncertain process” that reduces the appetite to build. The government is clear on the need to promote use of brownfield land, and will remove all unnecessary obstacles to its re-development, including these sorts of planning obstacles.  

‘The government has already committed to legislating for statutory registers of brownfield land suitable for housing in England. The government will go further by legislating to grant automatic permission in principle on brownfield sites identified on those registers, subject to the approval of a limited number of technical details. On brownfield sites, this will give England a ‘zonal’ system, like those seen in many other countries, reducing unnecessary delay and uncertainty for brownfield development’.

At face value this is very radical step going beyond existing plans for creation of Local Development Orders (LDOs) for brownfield land[6] with a clear legislative ambition to create ‘automatic permission’ subject to a very limited prior approval process.   It is not clear what the limited number of technical issues would be nor what role if any the Local Plan might play. Plainly the principle of the use of zonal planning for brownfield land can easily be extended to other forms of development. The implications of this policy for the current system are significant, bringing to an end the discretionary nature of decision making which has been a corner stone of the British planning system.

However, what is being suggested is not a ‘zonal planning system’. The authors have, we understand, drawn inspiration for the policy from USA zonal system which is itself diverse.  The most striking feature of this system is the detailed nature of zonal ordinances and inherent inflexibility they provide for. None the less the ‘zones’ themselves have detailed provisions. What HMT is suggesting is very different being effectively zonal 'non planning'. Of course the idea of enterprise zones is well established but these have been applied to commercial development and not to the much more complex job of place making where design and quality have so much more impact on human well-being. The proposals as written would amount to the central imposition of a very large amount of land involving hundreds of thousands of homes so much is at stake.

Given that many brownfield sites have complex development issues it is even more important to ensure high environmental and design standards. These proposals would not allow for place-making standards of any kind to be applied to such development. There is also a major democratic deficit with neither local people nor their democratic elected representatives having any involvement in shaping the quality of such development. It is worth noting that if planners don’t need to make judgments on planning applications any more then the nature of profession changes quite radically.

4. Is there anything left of the 1947 settlement?

The TCPA has always made clear that is has no interest in defending planning or planners for their own sake. We are interested in very best possible outcomes for society as whole and that is the test we apply to planning reform. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act is important because despite significant modification it established the following key foundations of effective town planning:

• The nationalisation of development rights to allow for effective land use control
• Comprehensive betterment taxation to deal with values which a rise for the grant of planning permission
• Local democratic control
• Comprehensive control of all forms of development (except agricultural land use)
• Discretionary decision making based on plan policy but with local politicians having a detailed final say based on case by case expert advice from planners

Above all the system reflected the pre-war learning that to be effective planning had to be powerful enough to combat the negative externalities of an unregulated land market.   Placing the wider public interest, determined through democratic means, over the private interest was the bed rock of the system.   In fact the balance between these two sets of interests has always been in tension but in practice the pendulum has swung decisively and apparently permanently in favour of property interests.   The current Government is not responsible for all aspects of the decline in public interest planning.  The loss of betterment taxation and issues of compensation emerged within ten years of the 1947 Act and have never been adequately dealt with since.   However, since 2010 the remaining pillars have come under sustained attack:

• The extent of nationalised development rights has been significantly retrenched.  Permitted development now applies to change of use of most buildings to housing as does the extension of buildings.   Planning is demonstrably less powerful and consequently has lost control major parts of the urban environment.  This has direct impacts on outcomes for people in the ways TCPA has described elsewhere, but particularly for climate resilience and social inclusion. Significantly no attempt has been made by HMT to recoup the very substantial values ceded to property owners for the transfer of these state owned values.
• The reduction in the power of planning has reduced the democratic accountability of local planning reducing the scope and power of local government over planning issues.  HMT show a surprising willingness to impose central planning policy on local planning authorities.  The Government performance regime which will be extended, has no commitments to quality outcomes of any kind, emphasising speed of process over meaningful outcomes
• The viability test enshrines in policy the notion that private interest should outweigh the public interest in the nature and degree of policy that local government can set in Local plans.
• Discretionary planning has been identified as a clear ‘problem’ and will be revoked for specified forms of development.

If nothing else we should avoid sleep walking into the abandonment of effective democratic planning based on the 1947 settlement without a rigorous public debate.

5. Summary of other post-election policy announcements

Local Plans by 2017

In a written ministerial statement by the Planning Minister, Brandon Lewis MP, on Local Plans, he says, “In cases where no Local Plan has been produced by early 2017 – five years after the publication of the NPPF – the Government will intervene to arrange for the Plan to be written, in consultation with local people, to accelerate production of a Local Plan.”

Changes to Planning Practice Guidance on Wind Energy developments

In a Written Statement made by Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Greg Clark) on 18 Jun 2015, the Government changed the Planning Practice Guidance on Renewable and Low Carbon Energy. It now states that “local planning authorities should (subject to the transitional arrangement) only grant planning permission if:

• the development site is in an area identified as suitable for wind energy development in a Local or Neighbourhood Plan; and
• following consultation, it can be demonstrated that the planning impacts identified by affected local communities have been fully addressed and therefore the proposal has their backing.”

Improving planning performance designation

DCLG published updated guidance in July 2015 on the criteria for designating local planning authorities so that planning applications can be submitted directly to the Secretary of State. The threshold for designation is now where 50% or fewer of an authority’s decisions are made within the statutory determination period. Previously it was 40%.

6. Conclusion

Taken together the Government’s planning reforms agenda amounts to a sustained attack on the core public interest objectives of town planning.  This might be justified if a positive alternative to the way we control land was being actively considered. However, if the direction of travel continues we will see an increasingly residualised land use control framework without clear objectives and lacking key powers. Far from laying foundations the HMT policy paper sets as pathway to increasing confusion and creating poor outcomes for those in cheap housing built on brownfield sites to very low standards. The removal of the zero carbon commitment is clear indicator of the lack of understanding as to the challenges and economic benefits which come from dealing with things like climate change.

Above all it is what the paper doesn’t say that is most stark. There is no commitment to new technology in the built environment, no understanding of place making over the long term, no articulation of how people should have say in planning, no mention of sustainable development, no sense of the kind of nation the Governments is trying to secure. The HMT analysis epitomises the now tired and flimsy orthodoxy that planning is a problem rather than seeing planning as practical solution.  Above all we have to challenge that orthodoxy by telling a powerful story about the value of planning to peoples lived experience.

July 2015