More tinkering with the planning system

Last week, as an add-on to the Budget, the government announced yet another raft of proposed changes that they intend to make to the planning system. These were presented in the form of an oral statement to the House of Commons on 12 March by the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, accompanied by a document entitled “Planning for the Future” published the same day.

As has so often been the case in the past, the contents of both were long on propaganda, puffery and spin, but completely lacking in clear and precise proposals. Having read both the Commons statement and the accompanying document, I am really none the wiser as to what will eventually emerge, and so I am not inclined to waste time and space in attempting to summarise the suggested changes in any detail at this stage. Maybe a bit more flesh will be put on the bones when the long-awaited planning white paper is published “in the Spring”. [“Spring”? That’s next week, isn’t it? Well, when the chancellor of the exchequer’s ‘Autumn Statement’ can sometimes be delivered as late as December, I’m not holding my breath.] Even after the white paper, I strongly suspect that we shall just have to wait and see the actual legislation and revised policy guidance when it emerges from the government sausage machine.

Two new pieces of primary legislation are promised - a “Building Safety Bill” and a “Renters Reform Bill” (neither of which relate specifically to town and country planning – the first will amend the regime for Building Control, and the second will in effect be a piece of housing legislation). The other changes, which will most probably be achieved through subordinate legislation (although the need for primary legislation cannot be ruled out), include the long-threatened right to extend existing buildings upwards to create new residential accommodation and a right to demolish commercial buildings and replace them with housing. But the government still doesn’t seem to have made up its mind precisely how such additional rights will operate. Past indications were that this might involve ‘deemed’ Permission in Principle (‘PiP’) combined with permitted development rights to carry out the work itself, but I remain sceptical as to how this will be achieved in practice.

There are also noises about a streamlined, indeed ‘digital,’ planning system. But I am strongly reminded of the old saying, “Rubbish in; rubbish out”; in other words, simply computerising a system won’t solve anything if the system is half-baked in the first place. Before anyone attempts to computerise any process, what is needed is a thorough systems analysis of the existing process to understand what it is intended to do and how it is intended to do it. Only then can you start to design a proper computerised / digitised system to replace the previous paper-based system. One of the bugbears of the present development management system is that it requires far too much information from the applicant, much of which is irrelevant or unnecessary (involving difficulty, delay and disputes in the tiresome ‘validation’ process, before a planning application can even be processed or considered). If ministers are serious about ‘streamlining’ the planning system, they really need to tackle this issue; otherwise all they will succeed in doing is digitising the existing sclerotic process, with no detectable speeding up or improvement of the development management system.

There are also promises, promises (and a threat) about the plan-making system. Jenrick says the government will shorten and simplify the plan-making process. Amen to that, but how will they do this? It will require a huge effort to overcome the inertia that is hard-wired into the present plan-making system. The threat comes in the form of a December 2023 deadline that Jenrick has set for all local plans to be in place, or else the government will intervene. We have already had a foretaste of this with the threats made to South Oxfordshire DC (a topic to which I may return shortly). I foresee the prospect of legal battles if the Secretary of State attempts to carry out his threat.

And so on, and so on. I can feel my natural scepticism turning to outright cynicism. Further comment in the immediate future would be futile. We shall have to look at the actual changes when (or if) they emerge. Incidentally, there was no mention of the review of PD rights under Part 3, in particular Class O, which is believed to be in train; nor was there any mention of the previously canvassed possibility that the Use Classes order might be amended to bring greater flexibility to the Group A classes.

© MARTIN H GOODALL