There was near universal welcome for the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) when it was launched last March. Environmental groups moaned about details. Developers grumbled that they had expected a greater relaxation of rules. But planning is about solving spatial conflict in our very crowded country. The NPPF is not too bad at doing that.
Lord Matthew Taylor has now been given an equally demanding task. The broad structure of planning is controlled by policy statements, but the devil is in the detail. That detail lies in the 6,000 pages of guidance that sit alongside the NPPF. Lord Taylor has the task of making sense of this guidance, reducing its volume and making it consistent.
Will his review achieve this? He has already shown his merit in the world of planning with Living, Working Countryside – by far the best report on the rural economy, affordable housing and planning to date. But if Lord Taylor is to succeed this time, he needs to understand what nearly scuppered the reputation of the NPPF.
The National Planning Policy Framework would have not been half as good if it had not been for the energetic campaign against the earliest version of the framework. That bleak, destructive draft was slipped out as MPs went for their summer break. Within hours, campaigns had been launched by the National Trust, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Daily Telegraph. Hundreds of environmental and community groups large and small joined in. The biggest campaign in the history of planning succeeded in getting hundreds of thousands of people angry about scrapping tedious planning rules that they had never read. The dry as dust world of planning policy gained banner headlines in the national press. The NPPF even trended on Twitter on the day of its publication.
The intense press and social media coverage ensured that campaigners could not be ignored by a government more interested in the voices of developers than communities. As a result, the final NPPF was immeasurably strengthened.
So let’s learn the lessons of the NPPF.
Lord Taylor must be open, inclusive and consultative in his review of planning guidance. Tell everyone, ask everyone. Don’t assume that people are not interested in planning guidance. They may not ever have read it but they care passionately about how it affects their lives.
But Lord Taylor’s review has not started well. The communities department announced the membership of the review panel yesterday with barely a gesture to publicity. It clearly thinks that if you are not a planning professional, this review is not for you. That’s just what it did with the NPPF. It cooked up new rules in the belief that the people most affected by planning are the least interested. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now.
Planning may be tedious but planning is for everyone. The original draft of the NPPF suffered from the suspicion that it had been drawn up by a cabal of developers and their ministerial cronies. To avoid slipping into the same trap, Lord Taylor must not let the communities department control his publicity and dampen his voice. Planning guidance may be dull and technical, but it affects everyone and everyone should take part in its revision.
* Andy Boddington is a Lib Dem councillor in Shropshire. He blogs at andybodders.co.uk.
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4 Comments
I dunno, I find planning quite exciting (yawn), but seriously, I was one who did go to the trouble of reading the Draft NPPF, and for the life of me I could not see what CPRE and the National Trust were having their fit about. The document was a distillation of the planning rules. I found that none of the things that people cared about was deleted, and especially when, like all policy, it was read as a whole. What happened was that certain people read extracts without the context, over-reacted and then the protest started.
Though I suppose it put them in a stronger position, given the numbers of their memberships, such that steps had be taken to placate them…
Though I can’t for the life of me see why Cameron thinks that, if I can afford to build an extension, allowing me to build 8m will suddenly encourage me to do it. Why doesn’t he think about cutting the Vat on small build and refurbishment projects to bring all building work into line with new build?
You should come to Bath, every time anyone mentions planning, feathers fly big time. Yet there are other places in the UK that have buildings that are protected. A little bit of double standards here, listed building left to decay, I think another pub is in the offing. We like pubs in Bath.
Peter: I think your view is too cynical on CPRE and the National Trust. The final NPPF is substantially different from the draft version, offering stronger protection for the natural and historic environment and landscapes (not as strong as I would like but a substantial improvement). That was due to both the public campaigning, the detailed discussions with the government, and the technical analysis of the draft submitted to government. Even if you think that special favours were given to the environmental lobby because of its membership – I don’t for one minute that was the case – there is an interesting lessons for the Lib Dems in the NPPF campaign. If the Lib Dems could scale up their campaigning to equal that for the NPPF for the next election, especially online, people would be talking about running the country, not taking the brick bats for propping up the coalition.
Helen: Two of the biggest issues for Lord Taylor’s review are the PPS5 Practice Guide, which protects heritage, and the technical PPS6 guidance for town centres. Neither is perfect, though I am a fan for the heritage guidance. There is a danger that the scope for slipping poor practice past the NPPF will be increased if the guidance is decimated. And as we have noted before, planning in Bath is controversial. I’d prefer it that way to the 1970s when most people had not a clue what impact the planners and developers were having on their local environment and quality of life.
The NPPF was a good start – reducing over 1,000 pages of planning regulation down to around 50 makes it accessible to the public. But it needs to go far further if Britain’s planning crisis is to be overcome. I wish Matthew all the best with his task – if he can reduce 6,000 pages down to 300 he’ll have done a great thing.
The way to resolve our planning deadlock and still protect valued amenity is not to replace one set of regulations with another, however. We need to devolve ownership of development rights to individuals and small communities, enabling them both to decide what to develop and to reap the benefits (and the costs) of permitting development.
At the moment, England has 323 planning authorities, which means that, even if the planning authority can extract some value from development, it makes precious little difference to those most directly effected. In Germany, with 13,000 planning authorities, the system works far better.