On how planning nearly killed Birmingham and why garden cities aren't the answer

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And before Brummies leap in and accuse me of doing down their city, the same goes for Bradford, for Leeds and for just about every other big city. Here's the quote from The Economist blog:

In the post-war era, there was a strong sense among British politicians that cities were slightly unpleasant things like mushrooms that ought not be allowed to grow too fast. Inspired by utopian city planners such as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, they decided that urban metropolises had to be cut back. Without much consultation, enormous numbers of people were "decanted" from inner-city slums to grey suburban council estates, where loneliness and crime thrived. Meanwhile, the city centres themselves were strangled with great elevated roads intended to get people in and out of the "commercial" zones. Birmingham probably suffered the worst of anywhere. Even Joseph Chamberlain's grand Council House was surrounded by roads.

Right now planners across the country are 'learning the lessons' of the past and drawing up new - and newly grand - schemes for cities and towns. Yet the echo of the think described above remains - cities are nasty, unclear, dangerous places and people want to live in ordered, structured and safe communities. We even have a "new" garden city movement:

Garden cities are back on the political and social agenda. Barely a day goes past without Boris Johnson, Nick Clegg, David Cameron or Ed Miliband talking about them. Lord Wolfson has got in on the act by launching a competition to build a new garden city in England. The prize of £250,000 is enough to properly kickstart a new social garden city movement.

And this 'movement' has a rhetoric filled with today's trendy rhetoric of 'cooperatives', 'community ownership' and 'social enterprise' - all guaranteed to get us shaking with excitement at this ordered world outside the city, a Utopian wonderland of community leadership, social capital and parks.

Forgive me if I don't share your excitement at building boring places filled with dullness, where every activity is purposeful, where committees of local worthies decide what you have in your front garden, the colour of your front door and whether you can put a six foot pink gnome by your gate. If you want these garden cities go build them but don't pretend they replace the excitement of the city or the mixed community of the market town or the tranquillity of the village. I'm with Jane Jacobs on Ebenzer Howard and garden cities:

“His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge."

And we've seen what planners did to Birmingham. Useful though those planner might be, we can't put them in charge.
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Markets work - so planners have to stop them!

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Central London offices are being converted into homes:

“We have sold over 100 office buildings in Mayfair back into residential use in the past year,” said Peter Wetherell, founder of Mayfair estate agency Wetherell. “All the period office buildings that have been used as offices for 50 years are being turned back into homes.

“It’s the biggest thing going on in central London right now.”

Tim Worstall at the ASI thinks this is excellent:

It is of course the change in relative prices which is leading to the change of use. And of course without a price system we'd not be able to determine the relative demand (and the effectiveness of that demand) for the two potential uses of the properties.

What Tim doesn't spot is that the planners don't like this change happening.
 

A second London borough has launched a legal challenge against government legislation allowing developers to convert offices into flats without planning permission.

Lambeth Council has filed judicial review papers to Eric Pickles questioning his decision to deny Brixton town centre, Streatham town centre and the borough’s key industrial business areas exemption from the planning laws.

Lambeth joins Islington, Tower Hamlets, Richmond and Sutton is seeking exemptions from allowing permitted development rights for conversions from office to residential use. And the government has already removed those rights from properties across Kensington & Chelsea and the City of London.

Planners really don't like markets you know!

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A panel of all the folk who screwed up urban design in the first place...

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...or so it seems:

"We’ve signed up people from architecture, planning and infrastructure backgrounds, as well as academics, health specialists and community engagement workers, to bring an informed expert viewpoint and help CABE champion good design."

Perhaps when we stop trying to micromanage - plan to death I call it - urban environments we'll get some better outcomes.

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Something everyone but the planners seems to know...

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From Keith Exford, Chief Executive of leading housing association, Affinity Sutton:

‘Housing markets are very different around the country,’ he said. ‘The case for increasing supply in London is pretty compelling because of huge demand and significantly higher prices. But in some parts [of the country] it’s difficult to argue that we should be building new homes.’

Like much of the North really... 


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First salvo in the town planners' war on community is fired...

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I recall a planner - a very senior planner - describing the localism act and its neighbourhood planning ideas as "the thin end of the wedge". It is a threat to their power and control - and they want it stopped:

The neighbourhood plan for Dawlish had been drawn up by a steering group of local representatives, including Dawlish Town Council and Teignbridge District Council.

The plan, which proposes 900 new homes over the next 20 years, has been examined by Christopher Balch, professor of planning at Plymouth University.

This is the first - an experiment that looked to be going well until this representative of the planning world arrived:

Balch’s report, published today, said that the plan reflected the National Planning Policy Framework by "providing a positive approach to plan-led growth". But he added that "it is not possible to demonstrate that the provision for housing growth is based on an objective assessment of housing requirements", as Teignbridge District Council’s emerging core strategy is yet to have been settled.

You see, dear readers, the local community had done it for themselves and hadn't employed the services of Professor Balch or his pals. So:

Balch said that Dawlish’s proposed neighbourhood plan is "neither positively prepared nor justified".

His report recommends that the Dawlish neighbourhood plan should not proceed to a referendum. In a letter to the council, Balch said: "This could only take place once the strategic policies of Teignbridge District Council have been settled and changes had been made to ensure full conformity."

That's it - the plans are no good because they don't confirm with other plans that have yet to be drawn up. Other plans that will involve planners not the local communities. And so - in my judgement contrary to the spirit of localism - Professor Balch, in the interest of planners everywhere has fired the first salvo in their resistance to communities having any say in what is, or is not, built in those communities.

I hope the referendum goes ahead and sticks Professor Balch's report where the sun don't shine.

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So taxes on development mean less development? No surprise there then!

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The "Community Infrastructure Levy" (CIL) is a hypothecated tax on development. The intention is to get funds for all those good things like schools, parks and bus stops that are 'provided' by government. And, like all taxes on business it's a cost - in this case specific to each individual development.

It seems that Council's have been setting the rates for this tax too high:

Stephen Teagle, managing director of affordable housing and regeneration at Galliford Try, said the company had done work earlier this year comparing the historic cost of providing 35 per cent affordable housing on a development with the cost of providing it on top on CIL payments. ‘We found there’s a significant gap between the historic cost and new CIL payments councils are asking for. Something has to give, and what will give is the delivery of affordable housing,’ he said.

Indeed some Councils are setting the levy at approaching three times the rate at which affordable housing can be afforded in a development. The result of this is that developers - if planners insist on affordable housing at current percentages - simply won't develop. Instead they'll bank the permission and wait until market conditions look at little better.

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Some evidence suggesting the CPRE are wrong about the National Planning Policy Framework

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A core criticism of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) has been that it will be in place ahead of most local authorities having adopted a Local Development Framework (LDF). Given that the NPPF states that, in the absence of a policy locally or nationally the presumption should be that (sustainable) development is permitted. Hence the CPRE’s response:

An analysis by CPRE shows that almost half of England’s local authorities (48 per cent) will be without an adopted Core Strategy development plan document on 1 April 2012 when the NPPF is intended to come into force. Almost a fifth (17 per cent) of local plans are still likely to be missing a year later. This means that, if the NPPF is not altered and no effective transitional arrangements for local planning are provided, planning applications in those areas will be decided primarily in accordance with national rather than local planning policy.

The obvious concern here is that developers will target authorities without a Core Strategy to force through their developments over the heads of local councils and local councillors. Now I don’t lay claim to being a planning lawyer – or even a planner – but I’ve been pretty sure from the start that this argument is best described as “scaremongering”. It’s probably true that, if developers felt it worth their while, there would be an increase in planning appeals (as CPRE suggest).

The question therefore is how the system – applicants, planning authorities, planning inspectors and the courts – view the period of transition. In simple terms what weight is given to the different plans, policies by those making recommendations and decisions?

Are the CPRE right in arguing that the NPPF – once approved by parliament – will trump any other plan? Or am I right in taking the view that, so long as the local authority is progressing to an LDF, that will be recognised and given due weight? Plus of course the recognition that “saved policies” from the previous (in Bradford’s case) ‘replacement Unitary Development Plan’ (rUDP) will also be given weight in any decision – rather like this (quotes taken from APP/W4705/A/11/2154371 Buck Park Quarry, Denholme):

“With respect to national policy, besides Planning Policy Statements (PPSs), Planning Policy Guidance (PPG) and Mineral Policy Guidance (MPG), the Draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is capable of being a material consideration.”

This rather supports the CPRE position except that the same Inspector, in the same decision, also said:

“The Council is in the process of preparing its Local Development Framework (LDF) and specifically it’s Core Strategy (CS)...for the next 15 year plan period to 2027. The CS...were published for public consultation and are scheduled to be submitted for public examination sometime in 2012. Given their advanced stage towards adoption, I give these documents more than the negligible weight ascribed to them by the appellant’s planning policy witness.”

This rather undermines the CPRE position. The developer argued that the emerging LDF should be ignored in preference for the historic rUDP. I cannot see that planning authorities, inspectors or the courts will take a different approach to challenges relating to the NPPF once adopted as national policy. Where local planning authorities are well advanced in developing a local plan, I can’t see there being this frightening scenario where there is no policy.

As I’m sure the CPRE’s planners know, the system has always allowed for weight to be given to new plans before approval – which applies equally to the NPPF and to LDFs. But then that wouldn’t have made a headline now would it!

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Well done those Councillors...

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The planning fraternity have in recent times taken to using all sorts of threats and such to prevent Councillors from voting differently from the recommendation of those planning officers. However, it appears that, despite the system being stacked against local determination under our Blairite planning rules, almost a third of "large" housing developments refused by members against officer advice have that refusal upheld by government inspectors*.

So cue the planning fraternity turning the screw a notch further:

"However, the down side is that councils have to pick up the tab for the fees of advocates and, increasingly, external witnesses, employed to defend refusal reasons.

"The volume of these cases must also be a concern to the inspectorate, particularly given the predicted increase in appeals and government plans to speed up the system including the proposed 12-month planning guarantee."

 Keep up the good work councillors, keep challenging officers and keep refusing permissions where you think it right to do so. And never forget that you're elected to think for yourself not simply to implement the recommendations of supposed "experts".

*This "research" wasn't very scientific and involves just 28 applications - treat it with caution

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Mad Frankie is right here....

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Francis Maude - dubbed 'Mad Frankie" by Mr Fawkes - had this to say about the National Trust and planning:

"No. I mean, our position is right. I think this idea, that creating a presumption in favour of sustainable development is somehow a massive erosion of the ability to conserve, is bollocks, frankly."

As we've said before, there is current a presumption in favour of any kind of development (it's in the original 1947 Act). Under the changes there will be a presumption in favour of sustainable development.

Precisely how much of a change is that?

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Bradford's LDF consultation will be a disgrace...

Cottingley

The current planning legislation and the legislation wending its way through parliament in the form of the Localism Bill speak often and loudly about ‘community engagement’, about ‘consultation’ and about ‘community-led’ planning. Let me tell you the truth.

Planners – or those planners charged with drawing up local plans, spatial strategies and ‘development frameworks’ – do not think the public, you and me, are qualified to know about such lofty matters. I recall being at a briefing about localism and communities developing local neighbourhood plans when a senior planner at a large metropolitan authority (not Bradford for once) described such devolution and public involvement as “the thin end of the wedge”.

By way of illustration might I present Bradford’s “LocalDevelopment Framework Core Strategy Further Engagement Draft” – currently so draft that the page numbering is inaccurate but that amounts to over 300 pages.

But this is just the beginning – there are some other documents, some of which the council has yet to publish. These include:

Open Space Assessment

Bradford District Baseline Study

Bradford District Retail & Leisure Study

Conservation Area Assessments & Management Plans (various)

District Wide Transport Study

Draft Settlement Study

Employment Land Review

Gypsy & Traveller Accommodation Assessment

Local Infrastructure Plan

Sports & Recreation Facilities Assessment

Strategic Flood Risk Assessment

Affordable Housing Economic Viability Assessment

Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment

Strategic Housing Market Assessment

Each of these documents will be over 100 pages – some much more than that. All of them will be hard to come by and laden with impenetrable technical language. It is truly a monument to the last government’s bureaucratic mindset and to the planners’ belief that only those will their occult knowledge can possibly create a strategic spatial plan for Bradford.

I am at a loss to understand how the ordinary public – the men and women whose local amenity and environment will be affected by these decisions – are able to engage with a process involving over a thousand pages of jargon-filled planning mumbo jumbo. This is not the local planning process we were promised when the “Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act” was passed by the Blair government.

People like me – with a little time and some knowledge – will try to understand what the planners are saying, will challenge their arguments on population growth, housing need and the distribution of employment, and will endeavour to get across to our local residents what the proposals are saying. But this massive, overweening, so-called “evidence base” will mostly go unchallenged except by those with the money to employ the experts to go through the documents and comment.

The Bradford LDF is planning to remove significant tracts of land from the ‘green belt’, to increase the size of villages like Denholme by approaching 50% and to force huge crowded “urban extensions” on to the fringes of the City. And it is that list of documents above that will be used to justify this pillage and to ignore the pleas of local communities for a conversation about the place they live. A conversation that would allow the negotiation of new housing – affordable and market – places for new employment and places that need protecting. Not from the view point of some expensive, besuited consultant but from the local people who the plan will affect.

It is a disgrace.

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Some good news, some secrecy and a worry about planning in Bradford

Cullingworth

On Friday, the Shipley Planning Panel refused an application to build over 400 new houses on land at Sty Lane in Micklethwaite near Bingley. Land next to the Leeds Liverpool Canal and close to the great pair of Bingley locks – five-rise and three-rise.

The audience cheered and stamped their feet as councillors voted six to one against proposals by developers Redrow and Bellway to build on the site at Sty Lane, Micklethwaite.

Councillors said they felt access to the site, which was principally via a swing bridge over the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, was not adequate.

There will be an appeal – indeed the date is already set – so those objecting to the development might yet have their hopes dashed.

My purpose in highlighting this decision isn’t simply to discuss the particular development but to make a wider observation about Bradford’s Local Development Framework (LDF) Core Strategy. See, you’ve already got drooping eyelids and a fuzzy head at the planning jargon. Like most people, this strategy will be informed more by professional lobbyists – the developers, the “environment” campaigns and the heritage advocates – than by local people considering what development is needed and how to go about providing that development.

The LDF Core Strategy won’t point directly at the precise locations for development but will decide how much housing, employment and infrastructure is needed and how land allocation can be used to make that provision. And, right now, it is being driven by hidden evidence – documents that Bradford Council has not published:

·         The Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment (SHLAA) – this assesses the possible sites across the district and has been conducted by a panel including representatives of the housebuilders, the social housing sector and the council. No elected members are involved in this process and other than a report on process and methodology to scrutiny, there will be no member process.

·         The Strategic Housing Market Assessment (SHMA) – this analyses the housing market in Bradford in depth advising on the types of housing needed in different areas and the amount and pattern of need for affordable housing – housing provided for sale and rent at below market prices. It was commissioned from consultants in 2009 and completed a year later. The council refuses to publish this document ahead of publishing the LDF Core Strategy

When the LDF Core strategy is published, these two studies will be presented as irrefutable evidence supporting the Council’s strategy. There will be no scope for challenging these documents – we will be expected to work with them as the basis of determining the core strategy. And I can tell you what the key proposal in that strategy – based on this evidence they won’t let us see – will be.

In order to meet the need for housing – 50,000 new houses over 15 years – we will be told that we have to release land from the ‘green belt’. Land like the site at Sty Lane where permission has just been refused. There will be no scope for creativity in meeting this requirement, we will not be allowed to question the number – all we will, as councillors, be asked to do is agree to taking large tracts of land from Bradford’s ‘green belt’.

And before you all get excited about the current proposals for a new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and begin laying into the government remember that what I have just described – a distant, bureaucratic, inflexible, predict-and-provide method – is the system introduced by the last Labour government.

Over the coming weeks, I will try to set out how an alternative approach might work – how we can negotiate development with local communities rather than simply point at land saying ‘build there’. How we can incorporate the changed pattern of employment and how we can create a plan that is ‘developer-friendly’ without ruining the amenity – the fantastic South Pennines amenity – that local people cherish.

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Is planning too "professionalised"? You bet it is!

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Liberal Democrat Communities Minister, Andrew Stunnell hits the nail firmly on the head:

"A reasonable charge was put to me that I wasn’t being respectful enough of the planning profession. My point is that we have made it so professional.

 "This isn’t brain surgery. This is about how you shape your community. This ought to be a community-owned occupation, not something that requires a huge overwhelming amount of technical content."

Absolutely - by allowing the creation of a monstrous professional bureaucracy, we exclude the general public, the ordinary citizen, from the process except a supplicants (and frustrated supplicants at that).

And Mr Stunnell also reminds us that the "presumption in favour of development" was included in the 1947 Act that established the planning system.
 

"If you go back to 1947, you find that the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act had in it a presumption in favour of development, unless material considerations dictate otherwise.

 "The row now is that we’ve got a presumption in favour of sustainable development. The difference between 1947 and 2011 is not the presumption in favour of sustainable development, it’s the addition of the word sustainable."

 
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Perhaps this might explain why houses don't get built...

From a comment on Douglas Carswell MP's blog - submitted by an architect:

I am an architect who, occasionally, has endured the hardship of designing housing developments. Everything is place at the beginning; land that is begging to be put to better use, financing for the construction, etc.

And then all comes to grief on first contact with the local planning authority. The client knows what will sell but the planners want something else. In my area, they want only 1 or 2 bedroom houses. It could be almost any other requirement, badger sets, newt ponds.etc.

And finally, the following documents are generally required on the application.

Planning application forms
Conservation Area Consent Forms
Planning Fee
Location Plan
Detailed drawings
Statement of Community Involvement
Supporting Planning Statement
Design and Access Statement
Ecology Report
Archaeology Report
Heritage Statement
Transport Statement
Contamination/Geotechnical Report
Arboricultural Report
Affordable Housing Statement
Viability Assessment
Waste Management Report
Foul Sewage and Utilities Assessment
Structural Survey
Section 106 agreements.

All of that is a lot of very expensive paperwork. The local authority then requires the developer the surrender 40% of the houses for 'affordable housing'. The cost of subsidising this is then passed on to the remaining 60% making each of them less affordable and, presumably, increasing the need for affordable housing!

Maybe this explains part of the problem as to why houses don't get built!

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How to create a housing crisis - remove the right to develop!

Amidst all the special pleading and NIMBY critiques of proposals to change the planning system – you know make it a little simpler so as to allow decisions on development to make some sense just occasionally – not many people have stopped to think.

Firstly, when I say planners are anti-business and anti-market I mean it. This doesn’t make them evil but it does reflect the fact that the planner’s job is to control development (these days, in a fit of correctness, it is termed “development management”). So, whatever those planners might say, their activity represents a cost to the developer – to business – that distorts the market. However much this ‘development management’ might be a good thing, its advocates cannot argue that they do not distort the market and add costs to development.

Secondly the idea of devolving planning responsibility to local communities is a good one. For years planning decisions have been made in the context of a room filled with seemingly endless policies, statements, guidance and precedence leaving the local councillors charged with the decision (subject to costly appeal of course) with little or no choice. Replacing this vast overload of regulation with 52 pages of a National Planning Policy Framework (ideally enshrined in statute and therefore not subject to the usual ministerial mission creep) is a good thing. As indeed is recognising that communities can and should be allowed a substantial input to the rules under which development decisions in their community are made.

But this devolution requires a balance – a protection against the inevitable NIMBY and BANANA objections. We have to state – right at the top of the page in big capital letters – that, ceteris paribus, the owner of a property has a right to develop that property. And to profit from that development if that is his intention. If we do not have this right, we grant to neighbours the power – given the tyranny of democracy – to stop any development.

The proposed “presumption” in favour of “sustainable” development does precisely this – it recognises that the planning system already presumes in favour of development (if the plan says a piece of land is housing land it will be developed as such however much neighbours campaign to stop the development) and adds a caveat of “sustainability” that may or may not actually mean something. There is little substantially different in this from the current over-complex system.

The challenge for local communities is to take the offer on the table – and local councils should support them in this – and develop plans that allow for housing development, that recognise the need for rented housing and that are determined by local need and demand rather than by the decisions of some distant bureaucrat who has never visited nor is likely to visit.

In Cullingworth, increasing the size of the village by around 10% would not be a problem – this is 100-150 houses and there are existing permissions for around 70 already. The remainder could come from developing sites within the current village boundary and permitting the conversion of redundant agricultural buildings to residential use. This would not impact on the ‘green belt’ nor would it need to be done in one fell swoop - it could be spread across a flexible ten-year plan period.

Scale this sort of locally-led approach to development up across the country – assume that current permissions will be developed and that historic designations for housing (however much we may not support them) will remain – and the one million or so houses we need can be delivered without the sort of high profile “they’re concreting over the countryside” campaigns we are familiar with through the pages of the newspapers.

It is this approach that could come from the localism proposals and the limiting of national direction over planning. But we cannot further nationalise property rights by removing the presumption in favour of development – that would be wrong and, just as bad, would make existing challenges meeting housing need, especially in the south east into a real crisis.

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Mrs Fowler's problem is nothing to do with the Coalition proposals on planning...

The view into Swaledale - nowhere near Sudbury but lovely nonetheless

Planning is a tricky business. Especially if, like me, you’re the elected representative of about 20,000 people living in West Yorkshire’s ‘green belt’ – or the glorious South Pennines as I prefer to call it. However, the degree of rubbish that is spoken about planning beggars belief. And is only topped by the utter nonsense spouted from all sides on the subject of housing and housing markets.

The biggest bit of nonsense is the implication that our current planning system doesn’t start from the premise that the land owner has a right to develop. The point of planning has not been to stop development but to direct that development. This has always been so and, despite the efforts of socialists and assorted NIMBYs, remains the case.

So when the government proposes a simplified planning frame work that presumes in favour of “sustainable development”, why do we get an explosion of shock and wild claims that vast acres of England’s green and pleasant land will be snaffled up by evil housing developers seeking only vast profits from the building of ticky-tacky boxes all over those productive fields.

We get writing like this evoking England’s wonders:

The fields are at their most golden and shadowy now, their soft lines framed by the ash trees; the sloes and blackberries are swelling, and plums squash underfoot. Two bikes are abandoned by the track, left by children who are exploring the woods. A young couple smooch in the weakening summer light. A flushed jogger from the local estate waves, as his Spaniel strains to get off the lead and on to the open land.

The writer, one Rebecca Fowler, wishes to protect her interests as the owner of a fine old house with a glorious view. And apparently the Coalition's policies are threatening this interest:

Twelve months on, it is not the spectre of ghosts that face us, but bulldozers. We are at the centre of a battle for the countryside threatened by potentially drastic “planning reforms”. As Clive Aslet outlined this week in The Daily Telegraph, under the new government proposals, the opportunity for effective local opposition to housing developments will be superseded, and cash incentives offered to councils to pass plans in a bid to boost the economy with a quick-fix, concrete-coated solution.

Immediately I smelled a rat – this woman is opposing an existing planning proposal under existing planning rules. Why – other than the newspaper’s campaign – is she referring to rules not yet in place?

Yet that view is now threatened by a development of 170 houses. Despite passionate opposition, not just from ourselves but more than 2,000 locals, English Heritage and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, plans are close to being approved.

So it has precisely nothing to do with the new National Planning Policy Framework at all. But is a purely local debate as to whether or not Mrs Fowler’s view should be spoiled conducted in the context of planning policies and planning guidance introduced by a Labour government.

For sure, the NPPF won’t change this – there’s still a view that the owners of property should be allowed to develop that property unless there are reasons for that not to happen. And the presumption in favour of development enshrined in the original 1947 Act is, for the first time, to be conditional on it being “sustainable”.

The substantive change in the rules following from NPPF is that the specifics of planning – where to develop housing, industry and so forth – it no longer dictated by national guidance or regional plans but by the local councillors we elect to represent us. People who we can ‘un-elect’ should we so wish. The ability of developers to appeal to distant inspectors is curtailed and the centralising, controlling ‘planning policy guidance’ and ‘planning policy statements’ will be consigned to the dustbin.

Right now those 2000 people (plus Mrs Fowler) in Sudbury are opposing a vast, impenetrable bureaucratic system that satisfies no-one except the planners and lawyers who make their livings from its byzantine detail. Allowing local decisions makes sense – it may still mean Mrs Fowler loses her view but that decision will be made by politicians who she and her neighbours elect not by a government official in Bristol.

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