Politics of Housing in the UK: Can the Planning and Infrastructure Bill help deliver the homes the government has pledged?

A crucial part of the government’s narrative around growth has focused on housing, and the role it will play in delivering it. In the first of the series we set out the proposals which the government hopes will help it meet its ambitious targets for homes, and consider how likely they are to help plug the existing delivery gap.

A new approach to spatial planning

Since the abolition of regional planning it has, in most of the country, been all too easy for LPAs to consider only their own needs when preparing policies. The government is now clear that it does not think that the growth needed in the country will be possible without planning on a larger than local scale. The Bill therefore introduces a system of strategic planning, via “spatial development strategies”.

• What are spatial development strategies? A statement of policies on the development and uses of land in the “strategy area”, which are of strategic importance to that area, including
  • Identifying infrastructure of strategic importance; and
  • Specifying the amount or distribution of housing.
• Who prepares them? The “strategic planning authority”. These are combined authorities and combined county authorities, both mayoral and non-mayoral. Where combined authorities don’t currently exist, upper tier county councils and unitary authorities will be the strategic planning authority, and the Bill will give the Secretary of State power, where it thinks it appropriate, to establish a “strategic planning board”, made of groups of upper-tier county and unitary authorities.
• Where do they apply to? The “strategy area”, being the area of the relevant authorities.
• What can’t they do? The relevant policies must be strategic in nature, and cannot allocate particular sites where development should occur.
• What considerations are relevant when preparing SDSs? Regard must be had to a variety of factors including:
  • The health of people in the area;
  • The need for sustainable development;
  • Climate change; and
  • The need to be consistent with national policies.

Once adopted, following public examination, the new SDSs will be part of the development plan, and relevant local plans will need to be in general conformity with it.

In many ways the regime will be strikingly similar to that which has existed in London for some time. However, away from London, regional planning has often faced criticism. The relevant areas were seen as too large, and there were concerns around democratic deficit. The current proposals address both of these issues, so have the potential to be far more successful.

That does not, though, mean that there won’t be other hurdles. In London, for example, as well as in areas where this approach is already proving successful, such as Manchester, there is a clear economic focus within the area subject to the plan. It remains to be seen how successful spatial planning will be within areas where there are competing smaller towns, with potentially very different views about the overall strategy for the area. There are also those who see this as simply another, unnecessary, layer of policy.

Environmental protection and housing delivery working together

In some parts of the country, nutrient neutrality has been a serious stumbling block to the delivery of homes. To address this, and the impact of development on other protected habitats and species, the Bill introduces the Nature Restoration Fund.

To administer this, Natural England is empowered to create Environmental Delivery Plans, setting out details of strategic “conservation measures” it will take to address the environmental impact specified types of development will have on an environmental features – being a protected site or species – and to contribute to the overall improvement of the conservation status of that environmental feature. An EDP will apply to a specific geographic area, and can also specify parts of that area where development is excluded from the ability to benefit from the right to provide mitigation via the Nature Restoration Fund, for example where only onsite measures would be appropriate.

The relevant conservation measures can include a requirement for Natural England to request that planning permission granted for certain types of development is only granted where it is subject to certain planning conditions, for example requiring a development to achieve a certain standards of water efficiency.

Where there is an EDP in place, a developer can request to pay into the fund, when its development would otherwise impact on the environmental feature, and the Bill says that, where the developer does so, then the environmental impact on relevant protected features is disregarded for the purpose of certain statutory regimes.

The government has been keen to stress that this approach will not reduce environmental protections. To ensure this, first, before an EDP is adopted, it must pass an overall improvement test, demonstrating that the conservation measures proposed are likely to be sufficient to outweigh the negative effect caused by the environmental impact of development on the conservation status of each identified environmental feature. It is hoped that whilst easing the burden on development, Natural England will be able to deliver more meaningful change, at a greater scale.

Development corporations

One of the Labour government’s flagship policies is the delivery of New Towns, and development corporations are seen as playing a vital role in that.

Established for the purposes of urban development and regeneration, they have historically been used to deliver large scale, complex regeneration projects, such as the London Legacy Development Corporation, established to transform part of east London to facilitate the promised legacy of the London Olympic Games.

There are different kinds of development corporation, each with slightly different powers, remits, and objectives. The changes in the Bill don’t make a radical change to the system, but seek to achieve greater uniformity between the different types of development corporations, as well as expanding their powers in some cases.

Key provisions include:

• enabling greater flexibility in terms of the variety, extent, and types of geographical areas they can cover. For example, at the moment, development corporations can either secure regeneration, or deliver a new town. Changes have been introduced to make it clear that these purposes can include delivering an urban extension, and that development corporations can bring forward development on both greenfield and brownfield land.
• codifying the objectives of development corporations, so that in each case they include sustainable development, climate change, and securing good design.
• standardising the list of infrastructure that development corporations can provide, in most cases expanding the range of infrastructure included.
• adding heat networks to the infrastructure list, and removing restrictions on some types of infrastructure, such as railways and tramways.

Better decision making

Irrespective of the merits of changes to planning policy and approach in the Bill and elsewhere, there will remain serious threats to growth for so long as LPAs are making poor, unpredictable, or slow planning decisions. Potentially some of the most important changes in the Bill, to help unlock housing delivery, are those changes aimed at securing better, more predictable decisions by LPAs – to be covered in detail in the third instalment of this series. 

Delivering on delivery?

There are certainly reasons to feel optimistic that these changes could help see the delivery of homes in greater numbers by not only increasing the chance that the country is planning for the homes it needs in SDS, but also removing barriers to delivery of those homes, in EDPs. However, planning is just one of many barriers the industry is currently facing, including issues around viability, and persistently high costs. Whilst this is a step in the right direction, the government still has some way to go to achieve the housing numbers promised.

But planning is, of course, about so much more than homes. In our next article considering the Bill, we have a look at some of the key measures which will impact on the delivery of infrastructure.

Authored by Hannah Quarterman.