Fixing the Foundations - More Planning Changes

Hot on the heels of this week's HMT Budget comes Budget Part II or 'Fixing the Foundations' setting out how Government intend to further push the development of the UK economy and particularly deal with lagging productivity rates.

One critical element, and the focus for this brief post, is the further changes to the planning system which the Report highlights in Chapter 9 (Planning Freedoms and More Houses to Buy).

There are some strong words here for local authorities lagging or failing to get an up-to-date Local Plan in place with DCLG poised to intervene and arrange for plans to be written where they are not being produced.  Quite how this would be enforced, implemented and resourced is not clear, but in many cases this will be welcome to remove out-dated policy and the vacuum that has persisted for many years in some places.

Critical to sorting out the Local Plans process is some further guidance (to be issued in future) to strengthen how exactly the duty to co-operate is supposed to work in a positive and proactive way.  This is, for many, long over-due as the duty has wrapped many draft Local Plans up in an extended and uncertain process for too long.  We will of course have to wait and see what exactly this guidance will set out.

To boost the level of housing supply, the HMT Report proposes policy to support higher density housing around key commuter hubs. This will, in most cases, have to be hand-in-hand with the better and speedier use of vacant and 'latent' brownfield land.  Alongside the existing LDO process for brownfield sites signalled by Government previously, we now have the basis of a US style zonal/sub-division system emerging offering the potential for automatic planning permissions on brownfield land.  As with other proposals in the HMT Report, the devil will surely be in the detail here, with automatic approval "subject to the approval of a limited number of technical details".  From experience, the 'limited' details may prove quite extensive and potentially onerous given that many brownfield sites contain some hidden 'treasures' such as ground contamination, complex access arrangements and a lack of services/utilities for example.

To kick-ass a bit further, the CPO regime is also getting a dusting down with proposals promised by the Autumn this year; again looking to speed up, simply and bring increased fairness into the system of land acquisition.  Again, this will be welcomed in many urban centres where key sites have sat un-developed for years, but equally it pushes forward the requirement for public authorities to be very clear on what land is required and why to support development and regeneration programmes.

Other measures to improve the speed of planning decisions are potentially extensive involving both tightening of existing performance regimes, but also key reforms such as a welcome move to introduce dispute resolution in S106 agreements.  The introduction of legislation to allow major infrastructure projects with housing elements into the National Strategic Infrastructure NSIP regime is also a clear opportunity to speed matters up given the number and scale of infrastructure projects that include housing in order to make them work viably and sustainably.

Starter homes developments get some particular attention here too.  Local authorities will be made to plan proactively for their delivery including ensuring such housing is in the mix for larger schemes; and exception site policies and the presumption in favour of such schemes will get some further support.  It will be interesting to see how the balance is struck here between meeting housing needs in particular areas with the viability and deliverability of starter housing for some types of sites.  Simply put, is starter housing right to be included in most site development projects?

So, overall some further depth to announcements made earlier this week in the Budget, but still its a teaser trailer for various legislation and policy/guidance announcements to follow over the next few months.  

One thing is clear, reading across all of the initiatives announced, there is a palpable shift here towards greater centralisation/control of the supply and delivery of housing and perhaps a step back from the localism approach of the last Coalition Government.