Wait and see

I am not getting excited about today’s publication of the Planning White Paper. Ignore all the overblown ministerial hyperbole and spin, and the overdramatic reactions that this has prompted. We shall need to read and digest the actual proposals, and try to understand what their real impact is likely to be.

There is a 12-week consultation period, which takes us to early November. The government must then, at the very least, go through the motions of considering responses. This will take another few weeks, although no doubt they will cut this down to the shortest interval they think they can get away with before ploughing on with their proposals regardless. The government will then have to introduce primary legislation to change the Development Plan system and to scrap and replace CIL with a nationally imposed development levy mechanism, not to mention various other changes to the 1990 Act. They will be doing well if they can introduce a Bill before the Christmas recess.

So we will be into the New Year before parliament gets to grips with the legislation. It is too early to say whether the Bill will wend its way through parliament in the usual manner or whether it will be fast-tracked in order to get to Royal Assent as fast as possible. This legislation may well prove to be controversial (even on the Tory backbenches), so the government may not get away with trying to railroad it through the legislature.

The bottom line is that it will be the Summer of 2021 before the dramatic changes the government is promising can actually be implemented. In practice, I foresee a potentially rough ride for the government over this, because they are going to get opposition not only from the usual suspects, but from their own supporters in Middle England (the stalwarts of the constituency Conservative Associations), which will feed through to concern on the Tory backbenches.

So, as the heading of this article says………… wait and see.

© MARTIN H GOODALL