Cllr John Moss is a councillor in Waltham Forest. He worked in development for over 25 years, before switching to campaigning and communications.
If we want to build the stuff we need to build to give our children and grandchildren the opportunity to buy their own homes – something rather fundamental to the continued existence of the Conservative movement – it is time to sweep away the “plan-led” system.
We don’t need to succumb to the socialist nonsense that is perfectly represented by “Local Plans”. We need to let the market work. We should let those who want to build promote their projects TO communities and work out the answer WITH communities – BEFORE putting them in front of the planners and politicians.
One of my earliest encounters with political ideology came when I discovered the serialised Readers’ Digest version of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Its cartoon depiction of “The Planner” has stuck with me ever since. As a Councillor sitting on a Planning Committee, I come across that caricature of socialism more often than is comfortable.
Conservatives generally don’t like plans made by the great and the good designed to order our lives, but we also don’t rush to dismantle institutions and structures either, fearing the cure might be worse than the problems removing it might cause. However, with the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and all the legislation it has spawned, we really need to decide that enough is enough and tear down the whole edifice in order to create a new system to deliver what communities and residents want, with homes, jobs, and all the other elements that go to create a nice place to live and a thriving economy.
The latest in a long series of failures is the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023. Rather than recast planning as something which would focus on the proper role of central government in facilitating economic growth in the regions and left-behind towns, and local government’s role to ensure that we build the right things in the right places with the right supporting infrastructure, while respecting the character of the communities where that stuff gets built, it has become a huge construction of hopes and dreams, rather than something which will actually enable those dreams to be realised.
It all started so well. We had Robert Jenrick’s white paper which really did hold out great hope for planning being done WITH people and communities, rather than TO them. This followed one of the Conservative Party’s best ideas – Neighbourhood Plans – which enthused thousands of people across the country to get involved with trying to shape what happened in their communities. Sadly, such plans were only ever allowed – by Conservative politicians – to be subservient to the higher level plans. So they never quite realised their potential.
This could all have changed. Let me challenge you to imagine how.
Picture the scene; a planning committee meeting has just started. The minutes of the last meeting are agreed and the first substantive agenda item comes forward. It is the in-principle approval of five hectares of land on the edge of a community to develop 100 new homes.
The planning officer reports on the series of public consultations that began a year earlier when the landowner held a public consultation in a local church hall which 200 people attended. They then report on the works of each of three working parties, made up of local interested parties, councillors and others who, together with the developers professional team, looked at the infrastructure needed to support the development, how to enhance facilities for existing residents, and the local environment.
The agreements reached by these groups with the developer will see them contribute to a Council project to add a classroom to the local primary school, relocate the proposed entry and exit routes, protect a stream running through the site and use hedges instead of fences for some prominent boundaries. This will mostly be funded by the developer, apart from the new classroom and a contribution which will go towards wider improvements to roads, footpaths and cycleways around the District. These things will be funded from the 5% Infrastructure Levy the developer will pay to the Council.
Next the officer presents the Design Code that had been agreed with the local Neighbourhood Forum, which builds on the character assessment of the existing community contained in its Neighbourhood Plan. This will guide the development of this site, setting out consistent design elements, such as road widths, building heights, protected views and tree planting. The details of the actual bricks and the colour of the window frames etc would be delegated to the planning officers to decide on later.
Finally, the officer explains how the ten per cent Affordability Levy would be applied to provide 30 homes at varying levels of discount to market sale and rental values. The developer will be transferring the value of those discounts to the Council by way of a legal charge once the homes are complete. This will retain that value for future generations.
The chair of the Neighbourhood Forum speaks next and welcomes the constructive engagement of the developer in the process. They highlight some of the issues which remain to be resolved and request that the Forum be consulted when the Reserved Matters applications are made.
Councillors then vote on the application, unanimously in favour. The site is added to the Council’s Local Plan together with the supporting Infrastructure Schedule and Design Code. Reserved Matters are expected to be cleared over the coming year and an anticipated start date in one year is pencilled in.
Every year, progress with that “Plan” is reported to a special Council meeting. The report sets out how much development had been completed, started, and what had been added to the plan – together with any infrastructure that had been delivered in support – over the previous year. Any adjustment to the targets for new homes and employment, retail, industrial space, or required supporting infrastructure, are also on the agenda to be voted on.
The Local Plan is reduced to a set of general policies which really don’t change much. Much of the detail is codified in the Building Regulations. The Local Plan is renewed, or slightly updated, every year. And over the course of time, sites come forward, get approved, get built, get occupied and the infrastructure to support them gets delivered. Local Government delivers for local communities and Central Government does the big stuff.
This is, of course, largely what happened before the 1947 Act put planners and politicians in charge of what got built, where, and by whom. Contrary to popular opinion, the time we added the most homes was in the 1920s and 30s, when we built at a higher rate than household formation and prices and rents barely moved.
As with most big socialist ideas the 1947 Act just made things slower, more expensive, and less responsive to communities. Macmillan might have, just, built 300,000 new homes in one year, but only by compulsorily acquiring thousands of streets of terraced houses which were demolished. And not many people revere what got built. Few of the tower blocks lasted 30 years before being demolished and the Soviet blocks of Council flats that remain are amongst the most expensive of all homes to heat and maintain.
Our housing crisis stems from this obsession with planning. Everything takes too long, costs too much, and is too risky. Who can blame builders for their caution or only building where profit is assured? We must tackle that problem at its root rather than fiddling with bits of a broken system in the vain hope it can ever be made to work when it never has before.