Build, baby, build

But not till you planners decide how to change the nappy

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

So, the much trailed planning and infrastructure bill is out, but I'm not sure it's answered any questions. Like many of these government bills, the devil will be in the detail and there isn't much in the way of detail.

There is an awful lot of the bill dedicated to infrastructure, including some rather interesting community bribes for those who might accept pylons next to their home - bribes paid for by the rest of us who don’t want them or would not get them anyway. There is a desperate need to speed up the process for infrastructure and it is right to limit the powers of judicial review to ensure that the timescales we've seen for nuclear and HS2 never happen again.

My real interest is in the area of planning reform and there are probably four areas to comment on.

Government has set planning fees for a very long time (they have just doubled them) and part of the delay in planning is that planning departments are very poorly resourced. Unsurprisingly, this means planning applications get stuck in the system as there is literally nobody there to process them. The difficulty for councils has been that planning might be a statutory requirement for a local authority but it doesn't come with any statutory funding. Therefore, when there have been other pressing financial needs within a council it's very easy to go to the planning department budget to make cuts. I understand there is currently only one London borough that actually covers the cost for its planning department from its planning fees. The big concern has to be whether allowing local authorities to set their own fees will resolve the issue.

The fees they receive will now be ring fenced to be only spent on the planning department. But how high do fees have to go before small applications start to be put on ice by applicants?

A Councillor having training in planning before being allowed to sit on a planning committee is not new. Some councils already require this although, of course, it currently cannot be made mandatory. The problem for the Government is they expect this to change behaviour. The idea of a Councillor, when confronted with a decision on an application for which a substantial number of residents are furious, is going to approve it on the basis of policy has always been somewhat for the birds. Training won't change subjective decisions.

The national delegation scheme is probably the most interesting aspect of the entire bill. As I said before, this was trailed in much of the early white paper but was not really picked up by anybody. The aim of this is for Whitehall, not local councils to decide which size of development is allowed to go before a planning committee and which can only be taken under delegated decision. This has become a hotter topic over the last two decades as Councils have been setting lower and lower thresholds for decision decisions going to committee to the point where some local authorities set up multiple local delegated planning authorities to decide schemes. This has got completely out of hand as the system is clogged up with planning applications awaiting planning committee dates for schemes as minor as household extensions. Changing this is well overdue but until we know exactly what size planning application will be allowed to go to committee it is impossible to give a judgement as to whether it's going to work. Thresholds are not in the bill because it will be decided at a much later date by ministerial statutory instrument.

This Bill makes a great start, but there's a considerable way to go until anybody can make a judgement as to whether it will work. It could be the Autumn before this Bill is passed and another six months for the regulations to be put in place. This will effectively be two years into the Government housing target of 1.5 million homes by the next election. In those first two years they should have completed 600,000 new homes. They built 200,000 in the year to April 2024 and any sensible person will know that figure will have declined further this year.

Without speed, there could be many very disappointed voters.