A degree of deja-vu: Angela Rayner’s planning reforms may worry many consultees

This is Blog no 76

Despite high hopes and heightened expectations, there was a degree of deja-vu around the DPM’s announcement of changes aimed at addressing the housing shortage.

Hers’ is the more ambitious mission, but Messrs Jenrick and Gove have brought more anaemic versions of the same reforms to Parliament in recent years and triggered precisely the same reactions as we witnessed this time around.

Fundamentally, the Government wants the planning system to stop being an impediment to building new homes and will force the issue by bringing back top-down targets as to which Councils in England need to build which number of houses. It hopes this will concentrate the minds of local authority leaders and persuade them to say ‘Yes’ more often. Both Labour – and Conservatives before them – suspect that local Councillors are too often susceptible to pressure from loudmouth minorities who use social media and much else to pressurise authorities to reject proposals which are perfectly okay.

That is why all three Secretaries of State have centred their ‘reforms’ on forcing Councils to have in place a ‘local plan’ that provides for sufficient homes. They despair at the local squabbling that makes such plan-making difficult and delay-prone. They focus is on getting it agreed, rubber-stamped by the Planning Inspectorate – and once adopted, it becomes easy to facilitate more housebuilding. Basically, if the proposed development conforms to the local plan, then just say Yes. Get on with it!

Except for one thing – consultation with local people. All three Secretaries of State have stressed the importance of local and community buy-in, and using public consultation is one way to help achieve this. Everyone seems to agree that the public must be properly consulted on the all-important Local Plan. Jenrick’s idea was to use a crude zoning-system, and to give the public a modest opportunity to approve it. Someone had to point out that, if, following a consultation, significant changes were made, it would need to go to a further consultation – and so on. The generous-sounding 30 months he’d allowed for the process began to look quite ambitious.

He was persuaded to drop the zoning, and Michael Gove followed with the big idea that opposition would melt away if only new homes were ‘beautiful’. Publish design codes and provided developers promised to conform to them, Councils can say yes with confidence, and dispense with unnecessary consultation. In all these scenarios, the emphasis was on getting the outcome that Government requires – more housebuilding. And the key is seen as having a robust Local plan which is legitimised in part by virtue of having been consulted upon. Then adjust the National Planning Policy Framework so that it becomes difficult for objectors to win an argument on material planning considerations.

In short, consultation is to be focused on the initial plan-making. Only a third of Councils in England already have a Plan. For those that do, all that is necessary is to amend it to conform to the new top-down housing target. And presumably consult on the revision. In all cases, expect an almighty push to take difficult decisions as to where in each Council, development will happen. For communities with strong views, it may be ‘now or never’.

Let’s be clear; there is nothing wrong with this pre-plan consultation. In fact, greater public involvement at this stage is very much needed. Just don’t expect people to agree, especially if it becomes a game of “Build – but only in my neighbour’s parish.”.  I can never once remember agreeing with anything Marc Francois MP has said, but maybe he had a point when responding to Ms Rayner’s announcement last week:                              He said:-

“It is possible to have successful development, but from experience it has to be something done with people and not to people. This policy is the latter. These pernicious top-down targets have the practical effect at ground level of setting one town against another, one village against another and one local community against another.”

That is characteristically over-dramatic but is right in highlighting the difficulty that elected members have in finding development sites by consensus. The Government’s emphasis on brownfield, greybelt and specially selected greenbelt may help, but no-one should underestimate the need to let communities express their views before a Local Plan is adopted.

What then? Gove’s ‘beautiful homes’ idea is jettisoned, maybe unfairly, but the real battles are fought application-by-application through the routine development control process. Campaigners normally argue that they are all for more housing … but not HERE. Alternatively, THE PROPOSAL is unsatisfactory because they disapprove of the kind of homes being built. A third objection is that they have no confidence that enabling INFRASTRUCTURE (roads, schools, GP surgeries) will arrive. The process must allow these voices to be heard … as well as those who passionately want homes built.

But local politicians can only determine the proposals that come before them. In the sporting analogy, one can only play against the team that turns up on the day of the match. If property developers bring a host of self-serving, community-insensitive, not-very-sustainable projects that just somehow meet the rules of a revised NPPF, what are Councillors to do? Maybe Gove was right all along with the ‘beautiful homes’ idea? Responding to Rayner’s  announcement, LibDem Daisy Cooper expressed the view of many that “For too long under the Conservatives, we had a planning system that put developer greed above community need …”

So, what is the solution?   Maybe we need to double down on co-production? Sitting down with residents, tenants, young people needing homes and communities as a whole before projects are developed !  The NHS has made it a virtue to engage and involve local patients and public representatives at this pre-consultation, options-development/assessment phase – partly because it is required by statute. My local NHS Integrated Care Board in Bedford/Luton/Milton Keynes invested heavily in training its Managers to go down this route. Yet we see less of this in planning.

Here is the challenge for all planning consultancies salivating at the prospect of doubling the housebuilding effort in this country. Instead of devoting time and talent to helping developers steer their projects through to planning consent, try to persuade them to engage even earlier with local communities – well BEFORE schemes are designed and developed. Some of this already happens – but not enough. What Labour needs to do is buy into the principle of co-production – possibly through the consultation that it has just launched on the NPPF. What the developer community needs to do is to realise that working with communities will make them more money than to fight endless appeals and court cases in order to get approval.

It is massive! It’s called the Proposed reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework and other changes to the planning system and is a 78 page document with 108 questions covering everything from travellers sites to onshore wind farms, calculation methods for housing needs assessments to planning fees. The last NPPF consultation in 2023 had 2,600 responses and a formidable analysis task. It is an eight-week consultation – less than ideal as much of it is in August. Even with AI, Ministers will have a mountain of responses to consider, and will need to take decisions in time to shape the forthcoming legislation.

Many consultees will be anxious. Here is the Community Planning Alliance’s critique – summarised as      “ … we risk a huge increase in car-dependent, infrastructure-last greenfield developments without appropriate levels of affordable housing, leaving brownfield undeveloped. Housing targets are on steroids while the promises remain on placebos …”  Labour will disagree, but arguably the consultation provides the opportunity to have the debate. It should not be confined to an inaccessible technocratic questionnaire. Ministers need to take their case out to the public – and to stakeholders face-to-face. I foresee the need for far more dialogue on the more contentious aspects of their proposals in the autumn.

This is because we can remember what happened to the last attempts to make changes to local planning. This is about hearts and minds, and if Labour is to learn the lessons of previous Ministers’ failures, it needs to persuade more people that housebuilding is necessary – even in some back yards.

Rhion H Jones LL.B

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