Is new framework really the answer?
Many readers may not be aware that a very important document was published on July 24.
It’s one that will have potentially wide-ranging impact for generations to come, both in South Holland and on a nationwide level, and no, believe it or not, I’m not talking about anything to do with Brexit.
The document I’m referring to is the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). It is supposedly the answer to the slow, cumbersome and frustrating planning system the country has.
The first version of the NPPF was published in 2012 and was promoted as ‘everything you ever wanted to know about planning in 52 pages’. The latest version has grown to some 72 pages.
There are, of course, many thousands of pages of other planning documents in support of the NPPF and to date it has done little to improve things.
The government has shown its frustration with the lack of progress on house building in particular and are using this latest revision to further add to the pressure on local planning authorities to make things happen.
From November 2018, all councils, including South Holland, will have a Housing Delivery Test focused on driving up the numbers of homes delivered in their area, rather than just how many are planned for it. This will penalise those councils who under-deliver over the course of three years, a change designed to increase the pressure on those councils that have so far stubbornly refused to plan for sufficient housing in their areas. However, this will impact not just these authorities, but all of us.
Councils now not only have to continue to positively plan and encourage development, as we are doing through our South East Lincolnshire Local Plan, which we are hoping will be in place by the end of the year, but also have to somehow ensure that the houses get built. As an incentive, if we fail to get sufficient homes built, the government has suggested that it will instead be open season for the developers.
At the same time as increasing the pressure for delivery on the ground and threatening to offer developers a free hand, the government is also insisting on high quality design across the board in all new houses. This is something that has been sorely lacking for many years now and it is difficult to envisage that this added pressure will do anything to change that.
The NPPF has also reinstated the reference to the Climate Change Act 2008 and emphasises a greater variety of small sites coming through the planning system. It doesn’t, however, suggest how the large swathes of land currently in the grip of volume builders could be released to achieve this. The alternative being that other, less sustainable, small sites have to be considered.
Expecting this accelerated development to happen, whilst also increasing their quality, is ambitious in the extreme. However, to then require those responsible for enabling the developments to happen to also physically make it happen when they are not the ‘layers of the bricks’, is showing another level of ambition altogether.