The new NPPF will help at the margins but does little to reform our planning system

When the government announced that one of their main strategies to kick-start economic growth was to reform the planning system, I don’t think I was the only one who was a bit sceptical. Reforming the planning system is a big enough job in its own right, without staking the future of our economy on the outcome.

I have just been looking back at the column I wrote in 2019 on the publication of a report on the planning system by Nick Raynsford, former planning minister in the last Labour government. His report listed 16 major legislative and policy changes that had been made to the planning system in the previous 20 years.

All of these legislative and policy changes were designed to do exactly what the current government wants to achieve – to speed things up and to build more homes. As Raynsford said, all of them, without fail, saw the system become more complex, cumbersome and time-consuming. Do we think that the changes made by the current government are going to be any different?

The NPPF is, of course, only part of the picture; it relates to policy rather than legislation. It was first published in 2012, before which we had Planning Policy Guidance Notes (I’m sure you remember the great PPG3 on parking?). The idea was to simplify the 1,300 pages of policy into a short document (the current version is 83 pages). The NPPF remained unchanged for six years, but then the tinkering began, with updates in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2023 (again), and the one just published.

It says some very good things. The reintroduction of mandatory housing targets is something we have long called for, although the formula throws up some strange anomalies that I might return to later in the year.

> Also read: NPPF: Government drops 50% affordable housing requirement for grey belt sites

> Also read: Planning more clearly is the way to delegate decision-making

However, my general impression reading the document is one of muddle. I have had a bit of experience of how these documents are edited. The first draft has a certain clarity, but then each department and interest group tweaks a word here, inserts a proviso there. Take, for example, design codes. Paragraph 133 says that all councils should prepare ‘design guides or codes’, and paragraph 138 says that the NMDC is the primary basis for these codes. All well and good, although there will have been meetings about whether it was ‘should’ or ‘must’, and where did the word ‘guides’ come from?

But paragraph 134 says that the geographic coverage, level of detail and level of prescription should all be determined locally. So, we start off with a draft that says everyone should do a code following the same methodology covering the whole of their area – which would have been a radical change to our planning system – then, after the edits, we end up with: you should prepare a code, but it might be a guide, and it can cover only a small part of your area and doesn’t need to be prescriptive; indeed, it can be whatever you want it to be.

 What none of this does is fix the planning system, which remains a mess and a muddle

This is relevant to the announcement about officer powers to approve policy-compliant applications without reference to the planning committee. This is something that I have argued for, although it will be a brave planning officer who approves a scheme with thousands of objections, however policy-compliant it is.

But, as Nicholas Boys Smith points out, this only really works if you are sure that a scheme follows policy, which in a discretionary system you rarely are. Clear design codes would help. Indeed, there had been talk of schemes that follow a code having ‘deemed planning’ consent, but without clear codes none of this works.

The NPPF illustrates the tension that lies behind a lot of these debates. There are those that see planning as a defence against developers doing bad things: building on our countryside, squashing our biodiversity, spilling nutrients into our rivers, clogging our roads with cars, overburdening our services, and not building enough affordable homes. It is assumed that these developers are making huge profits and the planning system is there to stop them, or at least to make them pay.

On the other hand, there are those that see planning as ‘socialist’, ‘centralised’, ‘technocratic’, and the ‘enemy of enterprise’ (all quotes from the Raynsford Report). From this perspective, planning prevents economic growth, deprives people of homes, and delays infrastructure.

The divide is not entirely along party lines. Governments of all persuasions have tended to support the latter view and have sought to free up the system. Much of the general public, I suspect, and certainly the objectors to development and special interest groups, support the first contention.

The new NPPF tries to do a bit of both. First draft: yes, you can build on green (sorry, grey) belt, but you are going to make so much money that we will make you build 50% affordable homes, and we cap the land value used in your viability test. Final draft: yes, you can still build on the grey belt, but actually you probably aren’t going to make enough money to build 50% affordable homes, and let’s quietly drop the land value cap.

The reaction in the press has been positive, although in the articles I have seen this is mostly reaction from the development industry, who feel their concerns have been addressed. Addressing industry concerns will indeed get more homes built, but whether we achieve 1.5 million by the next election I’m not sure. What none of this does is fix the planning system, which remains a mess and a muddle.

> Also read: Rayner announces plan to bypass local committees to stop developments ‘getting stuck in the system’

> Also read: Can design codes help to create 1.5 million high-quality homes?