On 6 August 2020, the Housing, Communities and Local Government minister, Robert Jenrick, launched an open consultation on radical reforms proposed in the White Paper “Planning for the Future”. Mr Jenrick pledged to overhaul England’s ‘outdated’ planning system and deliver high quality, sustainable homes to meet demand.
The open consultation covers a package of radical proposals covering plan-making, development management, development contributions, and other related policy changes.
Here’s a summary of the key proposals:
Local plans
Local planning authorities will be required, through their local plans, to deliver nationally set housing requirements. The local plans must identify three types of areas for development: growth areas (for substantial development), renewal areas (suitable for some development) and protected areas (restricted development). All local planning authorities will be required to have a local plan finalised within a statutory 30-month time limit, compared with the seven years it typically takes to complete a local plan.
Under the new regime, the primary purpose of local plans will be to reduce time taken to gain planning permission by clearly identifying sites for development and those that should be protected, as well as identifying where specific types of development should be located. There will be a single statutory “sustainable development” test against which local plans will be evaluated.
The local plans must clearly identify land for growth and sites suitable for substantial development, with emphasis on brownfield sites and university clusters. The land will have automatic outline planning permission for forms and types of development, which are included in the local plan to reduce the amount of time required before development can begin. However, planning permission for land within the green belt will remain under the remit of local planning authorities.
Local planning authorities will also be required to identify sub-areas to enable self-build and custom-build homes. Concerns have been raised about the quality of these structures despite Robert Jenrick insisting that the cutting of red tape does not mean that standards will be lowered.
Renewal areas will be existing urban locations where ‘gentle’ increases in densification and infill building will be facilitated, including small sites on the edge of villages. Protected areas, where development will continue to be subject to stringent controls, are those such as Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, flood risk areas or wildlife havens.
The streamlined process would also introduce a nationally determined and binding housing requirement for local plans in areas where affordability pressures are greatest. This is designed to prevent land supply becoming a constraint on housebuilding. Development management policies will be set nationally rather than being within the local plans, and the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) will become the primary source of policy. The government appears to be reverting to the planning system where the policies and housing targets were set at national and regional level.
All new streets are to be tree-lined and all new homes will be required to be ‘zero carbon ready’. A ‘First Homes’ scheme is also proposed that will provide a 30% discount for local, first-time and key worker buyers.
Digitalisation
The White Paper sets out the proposal to move the planning system away from paper-based documents to a digital platform. This includes automating routine processes and improving online case management tools to reduce cost and errors. Through modernised user experience (i.e. interactive maps) and by facilitating access (i.e. enabling online compatibility with social networks and mobile phones), the Government wants to improve the public understanding and interaction with the planning process.
Building beautiful
The revised planning process will actively encourage “sustainable, beautiful, safe and useful development” through new measures such as the grant of automatic permissions for high-quality developments which captures local character and further codifying requirements for carbon-neutral homes by 2050. Frameworks to efficiently assess environmental needs will also be introduced alongside new design codes prepared with input from local communities. To support, a new body will ensure there is capacity and capability within local authorities to implement and raise design standards.
Community Infrastructure Levy and s106 Agreements
The Community Infrastructure Levy, affordable housing and section 106 payments will be consolidated into a single infrastructure levy calculated with reference to the uplift in land value resulting from development, and to increase the revenue raised and support affordable housing provision. The prime minister commented that the reforms will make “it harder for developers to dodge their obligations to improve infrastructure”.
The new proposals aim to level the playing field by encouraging smaller builders into the sector, thus marking a move away from the “current handful of massive corporations” and towards competition and diversity. The aim of these changes is to have greater transparency and fairness in developer obligations where participants of all sizes will contribute a fair share of infrastructure costs and affordable housing quotas. How this will work in practice remains to be seen.
Establishing communities
The proposals seek to ensure availability of land for development and to support renewal of town centres through the location of new public buildings and public investment in development. The revised NPPF will make clear that masterplans and design codes for large developments must seek to include multiple development types from different developers to facilitate the build-out of multiple phases simultaneously.
The consultation on the proposals runs for a period of six weeks from 6 August 2020 and closes on 29 October 2020.
