Let's Do This Thing - getting planning sorted needs more than words

It is hard to believe Labour rhetoric on housing when its MPs and Councils continue to block development using the same language as Tory NIMBYs

Theresa Villiers MP writes in House Magazine presenting what is, essentially, the BANANA planning system - ‘build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone’. Celebrating her and Bob Seely’s anti-growth campaign’s stopping of anything looking even vaguely like planning reform, Villiers launches into a series of additional concerns about the ongoing consultation around amendments to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and then a new assault on the ‘Levelling Up Bill’:

“There are also continuing concerns over provisions in the Levelling Up Bill to allow the creation of national development management policies which would take precedence over local development management policies. These latter rules, a core element of our planning system for many years, are set locally and provide a bulwark of defence against overdevelopment, protecting greenfield sites and open space, constraining height and preventing loss of family homes to blocks of flats. Centralising control over all those policies could be deeply problematic.”

What we see here doesn’t only intend to put constraints on greenfield development akin to the disastrous Blair era ‘Planning Policy Guidance 3’ that required councils to run a sequential test on sites. Along with low interest rates, this policy (which became PPS3 later without really changing its effect) is perhaps the single biggest contributor to the disaster of 21st century English housing policy. And, while the Labour Party talks about housing and even mentions planning on occasion, we don’t see anything like a substantive policy from the Party leaving them exposed to a similar NIMBY campaign to the one that put paid to the Jenrick zoning ideas.

Plus, of course, Labour has plenty of its own NIMBYs with its housing spokesman, Matthew Pennycook, right at the forefront. The language used by Pennycook in opposing the 1400 home Morden Wharf development in Greenwich is entirely indistinguishable from that used by Theresa Villiers:

"I feel strongly that the proposals submitted would be inappropriate for the site in question and would have a detrimental impact on the existing character of the area."

Put simply this is a brownfield development and the local MP, faced with a vocal lobby opposed to the scheme has opted for positive local paper coverage and a few votes rather than backing a contribution to meeting London’s housing needs. Elsewhere in London, councillors in Tower Hamlets have voted against their own council’s regeneration scheme. Again the arguments used echo that Theresa Villiers language:

“A public petition against the development, signed by nearly 800 people, cites the closure of the underpass, and its supposed effects on residents’ journey times, as the reason for opposition, as well as the potential for “high density” housing to “tarnish the existing character of the community”.”

But these Labour opponents of new housing in London routinely add, on top of the familiar talk of character and fusses about traffic, comments about ‘affordable housing’ - usually claiming that there isn’t enough of it. Connoisseurs of planning battles across the world will recognise the anti-gentrification and affordable housing claims as, in essence, a Trojan Horse for simply stopping the development. We see this across the city in Ealing where the leader of the council, Peter Mason, is bouncing up and down about a proposed development by John Lewis Group that includes hundreds of homes for rent. 

The council leader, Peter Mason, has responded robustly to the proposal on Twitter saying that the Build-to-Rent market is dominated by cruddy homes and bad landlords. He questioned the commitment of the developer to providing affordable homes saying that the guideline minimum of 35% has not been referred to in the outline plans and previous discussions have indicated the scheme would contain less than that. He said, “That won’t stand.”

“Cllr Mason added, “Our recently published new Local Plan sets out very clear guidance on a range of sites that we believe will be developed over the next decade.

“The guidance here was for a 7 - 13 storey development.

“I'm certain that this will still be too big for some.

“All of this feedback has been given to the developers, directly, by Ealing's planners and politicians.”

He continued, pulling no punches, “at the moment it feels like a big institution is trying to twist arms & bully through a scheme, that could be far better, through a precarious planning process using the ever present threat of an appeal.”

Again, leaving aside the comments about landlords, we see the sort of language and arguments that Villiers uses. The scheme is too tall, doesn’t match the character of the area and isn’t affordable. We see another political tactic here too with the claim that using the planning system as designed is somehow bullying the council into agreeing to the scheme. What is strikingly similar to the Villiers position here is that Peter Mason said he wanted to stop the development before the last local elections, included it in a platform for that election and has drawn up a draft local plan that is intended to stop the scheme. Notwithstanding the merits of the scheme in question, all this makes for a juicy examination of that draft local plan.

In Westminster, again prior to taking over running the Council, Labour campaigned against another development. The proposals for three towers at Paddington Green got the local party all flustered:

“We’re urging the Mayor of London to use his powers to refuse permission for Berkeley Homes to build three mega blocks, including one of 32 stories, on the site of the former Paddington Green police station. These plans have already been turned down by Westminster Council but, due to the scale of the proposed development, the Mayor has the final say.”

The Mayor did as he was told but the whole episode will start again now the developer, Berkeley Homes, has submitted an amended scheme. We can expect that Labour councillors in Westminster, while decrying the lack of affordable housing and the Borough’s housing crisis, will do a quick and hypocritical about turn to oppose the new scheme for being too tall, out of character and damaging to the conservation area (something like 90% of Westminster is a conservation area by the way).

While many will welcome the (essentially opportunistic) conversion of Labour politicians to the cause of housing delivery and that some suggest this might involve planning reform, we should perhaps not hold our breath. When the Jenrick White Paper was published the Labour response was to say that the proposals represented a ‘developers charter’ as they lined up behind the Local Government Association in opposing the idea that once a site has an allocation there should not need to be a planning application to establish the principle of development. Labour, at least where its representatives give an opinion on planning, is likely to fall back on its big state instincts by calling for more not less planning.

We cannot expect any genuinely brave policy on housing such as green belt reform from a Starmer government. And we can expect that new MPs with slender majorities in suburban seats will, just as is the case with Theresa Villiers on the Conservative side, be led by NIMBY campaigns against development. The only way in which substantial planning reform is going to happen is via a bi-partisan agreement similar to that we’ve seen in New Zealand:

“In a rare show of bipartisanship, Labour government ministers Megan Woods and David Parker shared the podium with National's leader Judith Collins and housing spokesperson Nicola Willis to announce the changes at midday.

The parties worked together on the new Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, which aims to make it easier to build houses.

It includes new intensification rules allowing up to three homes three storeys high to be built on most sites without resource consent, a change from district plans which typically only allow for one home of up to two storeys.”

Prior to the NIMBYs nobbling the Levelling Up Bill, there was an opportunity for this to happen. But Labour preferred to win a few cheap debating points on housing when they could have said publicly that they would back the Bill’s intention to strengthen housing targets. With Labour backing the idea it would not have been possible for 50 Tory MPs to hamstring the Bill. With this opportunity gone, we look to how Labour’s currently vague local devolution proposals will take shape. There is, however, a huge contradiction between a national insistence on delivering over 300,000 homes a year and passing power down to local authorities faced with huge NIMBY pressures to block development.

We have at least got to the point where our national housing debate recognises that reforming the planning system is needed if we are to build the homes needed. But we are still a long way from a set of reforms that have wide support or even a consensus that the answer isn’t more planning. Not only is there a well-organised NIMBY campaign that includes a host of well-regarded environmental and heritage charities but planning reform isn’t on the agendas of big housing charities like Shelter, important think tanks such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation or groups such as the LGA, the Town & Country Planning Association and the Chartered Institute of Housing.

The housing debate has moved on substantially in the past five years, shifting from a situation where people could argue that black is white (or rather that unaffordable housing wasn’t down to lack of supply) and not get treated as crazy to one where voices from across the political spectrum get a hearing when they say things like ‘scrap the green belt’ or call for four million new houses to be built in a decade. There still isn’t a national strategy for house building and the focus of the government appears to be around social housing standards rather than getting more and better affordable housing built. I hope that sense prevails and we get the sort of cross-party deal we saw in New Zealand - especially since it seems to be working:

“In a new study by Greenaway-McGrevy & Phillips (2022), researchers find strong evidence that the upzoning led directly to increased housing construction, contrary to fears that upzoning would only increase land prices without encouraging more supply.”

Let’s do this thing.