The new Labour Government has taken power on a promise of change and sees Planning as a key cornerstone of its intentions to grow the economy. To achieve this it sees a need to free up development by making changes to the current planning system. Its manifesto states:
The current planning regime acts as a major brake on economic growth. Labour will make the changes we need to forge ahead with new roads, railways, reservoirs, and other nationally significant infrastructure. We will set out new national policy statements, make major projects faster and cheaper by slashing red tape, and build support for developments by ensuring communities directly benefit. We will also update national planning policy to ensure the planning system meets the needs of a modern economy, making it easier to build laboratories, digital infrastructure, and gigafactories. Labour will ensure economic regulation supports growth and investment, promotes competition, works for consumers, and enables innovation.
It is apparent that its vision for change is aimed at major developments and infrastructure projects which will take time to put in place.
In our opinion a lot of change could be achieved, speeding up all levels of development by changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which does not require legislation.
When our current planning system was introduced in 1948 it was seen as promoting development, not a brake upon it. A system which would permit the right type of development, in the right place and at the right time. This presumption in favour of development has been carried through to the latest NPPF. In the intervening period however, many factors have been added, such as public participation, ecological matters, pollution etc., all of which are laudable but which means that even minor development such as house extensions get tied up in lengthy considerations and may incur additional costs due to additional reports being required or dealing with spurious objections.
The NPPF requires local planning authorities to be proactive, but this has been watered down by advice from the civil service that the addition of a meaningless paragraph appended to all decisions, saying that the authority has an up to date plan and offers a pre-application service will suffice.
We would remove this and instead provide what the public wants, namely that the system is truly proactive and that planning officers should sit down and negotiate to improve schemes where appropriate. We have yet to meet a planning officer who does not claim to have entered the profession to improve the environment, but if this is the case why is there such a negative attitude to negotiation?
Part of the problem is that the planning system has been hijacked by other departments so that matters which can be dealt with under other legislation, such as licensing and environmental health, are passed on to planning. Planning officers should stop acting like postmen passing on such concerns and instead determine which matters are truly relevant, and send back matters to those departments as appropriate.
Councillors are particularly bad at this raising issues which are not relevant to the planning considerations but dealt with in other legislation. Better training and clarification that issues which are covered by policies, such as duplication on standards through housing and planning should not arise.
Recording of voting by members on the Planning Committee may help to focus minds that spurious decisions may result in action against those members.
Consideration needs to be given to the Local Plan process which is too complicated for the layman to truly understand, and which gets bogged down in challenges and objections.
There are two elements in a Local Plan, the qualitative and the quantitative, that is the subjective matters such as landscape and heritage, and those which are objective such as the number of new houses required and where they are to be permitted.
Anyone who has worked across several authorities will know that the qualitative matters differ very little across the country. As such national guidance could suffice leaving the local planning authority to consider how it wishes development to take place locally.
Currently the draft Local Plan has to be approved by a Government Inspector, but if s/he finds it unsound, even if it is only on one issue, it can be thrown out and the whole lengthy process has to start again. Inspectors should be proactive and where they find a policy unsound they should be tasked to working with the local authority to address the concerns, or if this is not possible to suggest alternatives.
We could go on and on, but this paper hints at several of the inherent problems which can be quickly addressed. We could add more as we are sure anyone who has had the misfortune to take on the planning system can also.
by Keith Oliver