Is that all? Thoughts on Labour's underwhelming planning reforms

Without wishing to spoil the YIMBY parties, they are going to be disappointed and, as the economy splutters into a sort of half-life, the only growth will be in house prices, rents and homelessness

One of the features of modern middle-class Britain is its hatred for one particular aspect of capitalism. If you attend a suburban meeting of the Conservative Party or a small town Rotary dinner you’ll meet people who’d be the first to tell you about business, how government should be run by business people, and why business is so important. Until, that is, you mention building houses. To this part of England, the developer is a creature of evil, the embodiment of corruption, exploitation and hatred of the ordinary man. Developers are not business people but rapacious bloodsuckers without morality or decency.

If we want to understand why reforming our planning system is so hard, this dislike for business people who happen to build houses - developers - is at the very heart of the problem. When Robert Jenrick, as housing and planning minister, proposed to change planning from a discretionary system to one based on predictable zoning, the ideas were attacked as a “developer’s charter”. Of course the Labour Party, cynical to a fault, took full advantage of suburban hatred of developers:

“Party leader Keir Starmer tabled a non-binding opposition motion in the Commons yesterday (Monday 21 June) calling for the government to protect communities’ right to object to planning applications…In the debate, shadow communities secretary Steve Reed said the changes – which he called a ‘developer's charter’ – would see local residents’ objections ‘gagged’ while developers built over green areas.

Another Labour MP, Andy Slaughter, said the reforms were evidence of ‘an increasingly corrupt relationship between the Conservative party and the major developers and builders’, calling it: ‘Donations for deregulation’.”

We’re now told, of course, that the Labour government is planning the most radical overhaul of planning since the last time we had the most radical overhaul of planning. The first stage of this radical overhaul arrived yesterday with the publication of changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). This was greeted with a mixture of excitement and rage as NIMBYs, YIMBYs, planners and councillors bounced around telling us that this was either a proposal to concrete over the precious green belt or else that, finally, the leash was off and planning would no longer stop Britain meeting housing need.

The changes announced yesterday do two significant things. Firstly they reintroduce mandatory targets for councils to ‘deliver’ new housing. And these targets, rather than being set locally through an ‘objective assessment’ of housing need, are now set according to a national formula that supposedly takes account of affordability but seems to have excluded the most expensive place for housing, London, from this analysis.

Leaving aside that it isn’t clear whether (or how) the government proposes to enforce the delivery of these mandatory targets or whether the mandation stops at having an adopted plan with just enough land to meet housing need plus a 5% or 20% buffer (depending on how much the planning inspectorate like you). It is entirely possible that, for example, West Lancashire , will allocate lots of land near Skelmersdale that has little developer interest but which means that the council has met its target. After all councils don’t build the houses, developers do.

The second big change, and the thing every YIMBY in the land is excited by, is the codifying of what Keir Starmer called ‘grey belt’ - bits of land in the green belt that aren’t pretty or have been previously developed:

“For the purposes of plan-making and decision-making, ‘grey belt’ is defined as land in the Green Belt comprising previously developed land and/or any other land that, in either case, does not strongly contribute to any of purposes (a), (b), or (d) in paragraph 143. ‘Grey belt’ excludes land where the application of the policies relating to the areas or assets in footnote 7 (other than Green Belt) would provide a strong reason for refusing or restricting development.”

Since the overriding principle of the green belt is to preserve ‘openness’ but these proposals provide a fudge by suggesting that ‘...previously developed land and/or any other land…’ might not be contributing to checking sprawl, preventing the merging of communities or preserving the setting and character of historic towns (that’s (a), (b) or (d) in paragraph 143). Which raises the question as to why that land is included in the green belt in the first place. Or that its scale is so insignificant as to make development irrelevant to sustaining the green belt’s openness. In one respect this definition undermines the principle of green belt (‘openness’) while at the same time suggesting that the land in question isn’t significant.

As Ian Barnett, National Land Director at Leaders Romans Group put it, grey belt is essentially a “soundbite in need of a policy”. We know what Sir Keir meant when he coined the term in a speech but, when we get to defining the term, the whole idea either means the green belt is unworkable (‘any other land’ can be deemed ‘grey belt’) or else that the policy remains a soundbite. Worse, the government adds further confusion by giving a sequential test for development: first brownfield, then grey belt, then greenfield. But isn’t most of the grey belt land previously developed land, in other words brownfield?

The changes (there are some other anti-business proposals in the new NPPF such as controlling the permissions for fast food takeaways and reinforcing the sequential test for town centres) amount to little more than a return to the situation prior to the scrapping of housing targets by the Sunak government in December 2022 with an added tweak to green belt rules that might make a marginal contribution to land supply. This is not the major reform we need because it doesn’t address the fundamental barriers to housing delivery: the discretionary nature of planning in England, that most land in places with greatest housing pressures is green belt, and the subsequent shortage of land where housing development is permissible. It may be that the Planning Reform Bill promised in the 2024 King’s Speech will resolve these matters but, from what we know of it, this seems unlikely.

The most likely outcome of these proposals will be that, despite the mandatory housing targets, housing delivery will not reach the levels anticipated in Labour’s plans for 1.5m new homes across the five years of this parliament. Some have gone as far as to say this target is ‘impossible’:

“Labour-run councils said they were on a 'collision course' with the government over the plans. Councillor Yvonne Gagen, leader of West Lancashire Council, called the targets 'impossible'.”

Meanwhile, the sensible idea that council planning committees should not be able to refuse permission where that council has allocated the land for housing is also under fire. Here the Labour Party is being hoist with its own petard, blown up by the same ‘developers charter’ criticism they exploited to kill off Robert Jenrick’s zoning proposals. Here’s the Town & Country Planning Association (born from Ebeneezer Howard’s garden cities movement):

“The announcement that democratically accountable planning committees are to be bypassed in order to enforce the government’s new housing targets was the latest in a long line of measures which began in 2008 by limiting the legal rights of the public in major infrastructure decisions. It has gone on to include the widespread expansion of permitted development rights, which marginalises the voice of people and their elected representatives and includes the forthcoming National Development Management Policies designed to restrict communities from setting localised policy.”

Of course the TCPA doesn’t think the planning system is a problem and tells us that the housing crisis can be resolved by building council houses on imaginary land presumably not subject to those planning committees, but they, along with the CPRE and the Community Planning Alliance represent the shock troops of opposition to ‘developers’ and the idea that private builders can provide the houses we need if the government would only get out of the way. Returning to where we started, a large part of suburban England (remember that the majority of England's homes are suburban) really hates developers believing them to be entirely responsible for too many houses, too few houses, high house prices, poor housing quality, and probably replacing Merry Christmas with Season’s Greetings or Happy Holidays.

I hope, of course, that I’m wrong and that these relatively minor changes to the planning system will stimulate a rate of house building (by those developers we all hate) last seen in the 1930s. But I am not getting my hopes up even if councils do perform a miracle and get local plans in place within 12 weeks and the grey belt releases lots of development land onto the market. What we’ll see is hurried and poorly framed planning done merely to tick the government’s housing target box while local councillors frantically run around blaming everyone else for the fact that they have to grant permissions for housing (as slowly as possible) against the wishes of a vocal minority lavishly backed by campaign groups like the CPRE and Community Planning Alliance.

Without wishing to spoil all the YIMBY parties, they are all going to be disappointed and, as the economy splutters into a sort of half-life, the only growth will be in house prices, rents and homelessness. I know I’ve said it before but we need to scrap the green belt, repeal most of the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act, and allow the market to deliver on building houses. The best change you could make would be to allow people to build a home on land that they own without needing to ask local councillors for permission first.