Let's fix planning

On taking office as prime minister, Theresa May promised to “build a better Britain” and lead a “one nation” government. Given the divisions brought to the surface by the Brexit vote, a good place for her to start is planning.

Recent research by the Royal Town Planning Institute suggests only 13 per cent of new homes are located within easy walking distance of a railway, light rail or metro station. Better planning would ensure that we use transport infrastructure and public services to help direct housing development to the right places, boosting access to job opportunities and, ultimately, economic growth.

Planning at the local level is now critical in the wake of the referendum result. So far, the biggest economic fallout has been on building. UK construction activity has fallen sharply, there are concerns over major infrastructure projects, and falling house prices could have a ripple effect on the economy.

Now is the time for stronger public sector leadership to drive development and provide greater certainty. As we demonstrate in new research, when local authorities work in partnership with private developers they can deliver results that the market cannot achieve alone. It falls to the public sector to make more land available through land assembly, de-risking sites (clearing up contamination, for example), and drawing in more private investment.

Public-sector leadership is also vital to master planning developments, to set and enforce high standards of building design, and to ensure “place attractiveness” including public and green spaces. Our research found great examples of proactive, public sector-led planning in cities like Birmingham, Norwich and Manchester, which have delivered more housing, more growth, more jobs—and better places to live.

Why isn’t this more common? In this country, we have run down planning over decades, as if determined to make the stereotype of the planner as a process-obsessed bureaucrat become real. Michael Heseltine’s infamous quote of 1979 – “there are countless jobs tied up in the filing cabinets of the planning regime” was still deemed relevant by him in his 2012 report on improving Britain’s productivity, No Stone Unturned. It’s this assumption that has driven decades of changes to planning policy under successive governments—despite the evidence from Heseltine’s own Liverpool—of how planning can revitalise struggling towns and cities.

Politicians have been told (and told themselves) that if only they “fixed” planning then the efficient, self-regulating market would deliver the development we need. This has always been a largely ideological claim, justified by partial evidence—some of it from the same people who argue that we should effectively abandon places like Hull (which David Lascelles wrote about recently).

Now we see the results of this 30-year experiment: a crisis in housing affordability, an unbalanced economy, and Britain’s perennial productivity problem unresolved.

A poll of our members, who are professional planners, found that nearly three-quarters of them think that almost constant changes to the planning system have hindered their ability to work. Almost the same number think they are less able to deliver the benefits of planning compared to a decade ago.

In England, endless “simplification” has produced a planning system that is more complicated and less certain, with eroding local autonomy, consultation and accountability, and a narrower range of affordable housing to rent or buy. As the development community also now recognises (and regularly warns central government), local planning departments are severely under-funded. Critically, they’ve lost much of the senior expertise required to make new development happen.

We can turn this situation around. It’s time to return to a more mixed economy of development, which local authority-commissioned house building will go a way to achieving. It’s time to fund planning properly, by allowing local authorities offering an efficient and responsive service to charge developers more. And it’s time for politicians to stop the constant tweaks to the planning system, step back and think about the kind of planning we really need—and maybe even praise our planners.

The Royal Town Planning Institute has just published a new report on Delivering the Value of Planning