Sunday 29 November 2020

Want your grandchildren to pay higher rents and have no prospect of owning a home? Be like Simon Jenkins and the NIMBYs - oppose planning reforms

 

Once again Simon Jenkins has let rip about proposals to reform our sclerotic and divisive planning system. It is, as so often with columns in national newspapers, a catalogue of errors all misrepresentation all littered with emotive anecdote and non sequitur. It does, however, capture the NIMBY ideology:

The paper promises to shift the appearance of England. It intends to throw open landscapes, especially across the south-east, to uncontrolled “build, build, build”. It will tip wealth yet further towards London and end any levelling-up of the north. It will abolish the ages-old distinction in British planning between built-up areas and the 70-80% of land that is still rural. It will leave poorer city centres to decline, result in villages doubling or trebling in size, and building dribbling from one town into the next. Fields and open spaces will disappear.

The White Paper, of course, doesn't promise any of these things because every single one of them is false. What the proposals ask for is a system that provides certainty - for landowner, for developer and, above all, for local communities. Right now everybody bar a few planning academics hates our planning system. Talk to a housebuilder and (taking a few paces backwards) listen as the explain how the system means they've millions in scarce working capital tied up in undeveloped land and how the process of getting a permission to build is tortuous and prohibitatively expensive. Even with the best lawyers there's still only an evens chance of the permission getting approved.

Fine, you say, that's only a greedy developer talking, what about real people? Thing is that they hate it too. Talk to a local councillor and hear how they bang their head against the system, how planners don't listen, how the rules are inconsistent and poorly enforced. Then chat to a few residents who'll tell you that the system is stacked against communities, how the planners decide on an essentially arbitrary basis and, probably, that they think it's all corrupt.

This is the system that Simon Jenkins is defending, a system that nobody fully understands, that is filled with inconsistencies and confusion, and that places too much discretionary power in the hands of planners, councillors and the secretary of state. Jenkins rather strangely, claims that the proposals were "slipped out with a minimum of publicity", which will come as a surprise to newspapers like The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Mail who all gave prominent (and slightly negative) coverage to the White Paper or to the thousands of submissions made to the Government's consultation on the proposals. Jenkins even makes this claim with a link to a substantial (and error-strewn) article based on egregious comments from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in the same newspaper.

Nowhere else in the world has a planning system like Britain's. There are some places - California, British Colombia, New South Wales, New Zealand, Catalonia - with systems that, while different, are equally divisive, but nowhere else in the world has a system that makes strategic land allocations and then allows local councils to override those allocations by refusing permission to develop. Even more stupidly, the British system has local councils making the strategic plans and then the same councillors refusing development entirely based on the strategic plan they earlier approved.

Jenkins, however, goes on to double down on his misrepresentation of the proposals. The starting point (something the actual white paper actually seeks to end) is a scare story about a "mutant algorithm" that will decide where housing development should go. Remember that, for NIMBYs like Jenkins, housing needs to go somewhere else - ideally run down inner cities a long way from their lovely semi-rural idyll. This applies doubly so to housing for poor people. After all what benefit would such people gain from being able to live in a tidy little market town or a newly expanded village?

The current national housing strategy, for all its relative success next to those from previous governments, isn't sustainable. Without a significant increase in the land available for development, it is unlikely that even the current, barely sufficient, levels of new housing will not continue. "Brownfield land", "regeneration", "the north" shout the fans of our discretionary, NIMBY-dominated planning system. Yet the brownfield sites they point to are a long way from the jobs, from the good schools, from the health networks and communities that make for a good life. Above all these sites are a long way from where people want to live. Yet Jenkins and other NIMBYs tell us to build unfriendly tower blocks into which to cram all those unfortunates not able to buy into their far suburban part of England's countryside.

The NIMBYs go on to say that planning liberalisation means no more open countryside. Here's Jenkins:

Planners expect that, among other results, this will put the overwhelming majority of farmland “into play”. One told me: “It puts every meadow under a death sentence.”.

Really? Current housing - every last bit of it - covers just 5% of England - even less in Scotland and Wales. Rural England is not under any threat at all from planning reform. Jenkins moans about "villages doubling or trebling in size" without even hesitating for a second to wonder whether a village getting, as my South Pennine village has done, some 20% bigger might just be a way to keep the pub going, to support the chemist, the post office and village shop. It might be a way to justify keeping a regular bus service and to stop the local primary merging with the one from the next village.

We have a chance to create a zoning system that, as well as removing the uncertainty of out discretionary method, allows for a locally-determined approach to new development while protecting the buildings and places we value most highly. There's a determined effort - from the likes of Jenkins, from the NIMBY campaign group CPRE, and from a variety of vested interests - to oppose the proposals and to maintain a system where there are no winners except homeowners on the suburban fringe and the politicians who exploit their fears.

It is striking, although maybe less surprising that we think, that The Guardian has given so much space to NIMBYs and those who profit from NIMBYism. The headlines on planning read more like you'd expect from the Daily Mail with "new slums" and "mutant algorithms" rubbing shoulders with ridiculous claims that you can meet housing need without providing the land on which to build the houses. Look at how Labour-run Croydon Council's 'Brick by Brick' housing company has failed, not least because it simply couldn't secure permissions for the land it needed to meet its repayment obligations to the Council. In true Guardian style, this Council fooled itself that it could deliver much needed social and affordable housing without making substantial releases from Croydon's 'green belt'. The result is the fnancial collapse of the Council while the homes needed by local residents still aren't built.

We need planning reform. We need a system that has the confidence - or at least some confidence - of communities, developers, landowners and planners. Jenkins (falsely) argues that "(n)o other modern country has decontrolled its land use to this degree" without realising that the idea isn't 'decontrol' but rather for a system much more like that in France or Germany or Texas where, compared to too much of England, housing is afforable. All those other 'modern' countries have a zoning system and Britain moving in this policy direction makes us more, not less, like such nations in terms of land use control. Without reform, we condemn Jenkins grandchildren - a whole generation - to the prospect of only being able to afford a home through inheritance or other financial good fortune. Worse, the millions who want to own a home and can't will find themselves stuck in a world of spiralling rents, exploitative landlords and overwhelmed social housing management. The world that gave us Grenfell,

.....

2 comments:

Sobers said...

Talk to a housebuilder and (taking a few paces backwards) listen as the explain how the system means they've millions in scarce working capital tied up in undeveloped land"

No they don't have millions tied up in undeveloped land. Developers NEVER buy land then apply for planning. They take options, or form so called 'promotional agreements'. Which basically means they sign an agreement with the landowner that they will try to get planning using their own risk capital and if successful will buy the land at an agreed price (or via an agreed valuation process). Any land the developer owns outright will have planning permission.

"but nowhere else in the world has a system that makes strategic land allocations and then allows local councils to override those allocations by refusing permission to develop. "

This does not happen. Any land that is allocated via a Local Plan has a de facto green light for development. A planning application still has to be made yes, but its more to ensure that all the practical issues regarding developing that plot of land are covered. Perhaps the access is poor, and new road junction will be needed, or the drainage needs attention. The design of the houses will need to be suitable for the area, the amount of low cost housing will need to be agreed etc etc. But fundamentally councils do not allocate land for development then point blank refuse any applications on it. If they did they would be taken to appeal by the applicant (such appeals being managed by Central Government), who would undoubtedly win, and costs would be awarded against the council for acting unreasonably. Councils cannot just refuse to allow development on a personal whim.

I cannot see how the zoning system will differ much from what we have now. We will have land in one of 3 categories - Yes, No and Maybe. Which is what we already have, land in the Local Plan, Green Open Spaces, and land not in the first two categories. Getting planning in a Local Plan area is fairly simple, in a Green Open Space area very hard if not impossible and in the in between category maybe, if you've got a very good case.

Even under the new system it will not be a free for all - the land may be in the 'Yes' category, but some sort of application to someone to cover the myriad of other planning requirements (such as drainage, utilities, transport infrastructure, ecology, public services, design of buildings, construction methods/rules etc etc) will still have to be made to someone, be it the local council or some centralised planning bureau. Either way its going to be as bureaucratic a process as it is now, and no faster or cheaper.

johnd2008 said...

Here in New Zealand we are faced with the same problems. House prices rising so fast that they are further out of reach of first time buyers or renters. there is certainly no shortage of land for building, the main problem is that the Government either cannot see the problem or is willing to ignore it. This is doubly short sighted as those most affected are those most likely to be their natural supporters, the young working class. John Key,the former Prime Minister has come out with the most logical conclusion, build more houses, thousands of them.