Cllr Henry Higgins is a councillor in Hillingdon
I have sat in the chair of a planning committee for seven years. I have determined thousands of applications, managed hundreds of public hearings, and steered politically sensitive decisions through committees where the pressure from developers, from residents, from officers, from members was intense and often contradictory. I know what a functioning planning system looks like from the inside. And I know what it looks like when policy loses sight of the people it is supposed to serve.
The Labour Government’s December 2024 National Planning Policy Framework is the most significant change to planning policy in England since 2012. It is driven by a genuine imperative. The housing crisis is real, the need for more homes is undeniable, and the previous system was failing to deliver them. On that diagnosis, there is no serious Conservative disagreement. But the response has created five problems that a properly Conservative approach to planning reform would have avoided. And the cumulative effect of those problems is a planning system that increasingly treats residents as obstacles to delivery, rather than the people delivery is supposed to serve.
Honesty demands acknowledging what works before criticising what does not.
The strengthening of the brownfield presumption, in paragraph 124 of the December 2024 NPPF, now states that brownfield development should be approved unless substantial harm would be caused. This is the right direction. Every derelict site is both a community blight and a housing opportunity. Brownfield first is not just environmentally correct. It is what residents consistently tell planning committees they want.
The Golden Rules for Grey Belt land require affordable housing at 15 percentage points above the local plan policy requirement, capped at a maximum of 50 per cent. In practice, because existing affordable housing targets across the South Midlands and South East are already high, this formula means developments in these regions will on average face a demanding 45 to 50 per cent affordable housing requirement. The requirements for essential community infrastructure and publicly accessible open space are a meaningful concession to community interest. They represent a recognition that planning cannot just be about units delivered. It must deliver places worth living in.
Here are five Conservative concerns:
First: the Government has made housing targets mandatory. It has not made infrastructure delivery mandatory at the same pace. In 15 years on planning committees in Hillingdon, the most consistent failure I have observed is not in the number of permissions granted. It is in the infrastructure that follows. Commitments are made. Roads, schools, and health centres do not arrive at the pace residents were promised. A mandatory housing target without a mandatory infrastructure delivery plan is a promise the planning system cannot keep.
Second: the Grey Belt definition will be stretched aggressively in practice. Grey Belt land is defined in the NPPF as land that does not strongly contribute to Green Belt purposes (a), (b) or (d) — checking the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas, preventing the merging of neighbouring towns, and preserving the setting and special character of historic towns. The two purposes not assessed in determining whether land is Grey Belt are (c) safeguarding the countryside from encroachment, and (e) assisting in urban regeneration by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land. This means developers can argue land is Grey Belt even where it clearly performs a significant environmental and open space function.
In the Heathrow corridor and across London’s Green Belt boundaries, a wave of speculative Grey Belt applications is coming. Whether committees have the policy framework to resist the weakest of them depends entirely on whether their Local Plans are current and robust. Many are not.
Third: the requirement for Neighbourhood Plans to include specific site allocations to retain full policy protection is presented as technical housekeeping. It is not. It materially weakens communities that have invested thousands of volunteer hours in plans setting out their area’s character and values without necessarily allocating specific development sites.
This change tells communities: your policies are not enough. You must tell us where the houses go, or we will not protect you from the tilted balance. For small parish councils with limited technical resource, this is an unreasonable burden. Localism has been quietly deprioritised in favour of delivery numbers. That should concern every Conservative.
Fourth: the Standard Method for calculating housing need produces targets that take no account of the actual developable land available in the most constrained authorities. Sevenoaks — where 93 per cent of the district is Green Belt, confirmed by Sevenoaks District Council as the second highest proportion in the country — receives a mandatory housing target calculated on the same formula as Newham, which has a Green Belt percentage of approximately two per cent. The formula does not know that 93 per
cent of Sevenoaks is effectively undevelopable. This is not a rounding error. It is a design flaw that will generate years of appeals, legal challenges, and community conflict without
producing the homes it promises.
Fifth, and most fundamentally: residents now have less say, not more. The weakening of neighbourhood plan protection, mandatory targets that override local preference, and the explicit threat of government intervention for councils not granting enough permissions — all of these move power away from communities and towards central government and developers. Planning is a democratic process. It should remain one. “The correct Conservative response to the housing crisis is not to argue against building homes. It never was. It is to argue for a planning system that builds homes and respects community at the same time.”
The Conservative tradition in planning has always rested on a recognition that place matters. That communities have a legitimate interest in what happens to their neighbourhood. That good development – development that genuinely improves communities — is categorically different from development that adds units to a ministerial spreadsheet.
The correct Conservative response to the housing crisis is not to argue against building homes. It never was. It is to argue for a planning system that builds homes and respects community at the same time. That means prioritising brownfield sites with the tools to actually deliver them. It means insisting that infrastructure delivery matches housing delivery – not follows it years later. It means protecting neighbourhood plan rights so communities retain genuine agency over their area. And it means ensuring that Green Belt and Grey Belt release is genuinely exceptional, not a routine mechanism for meeting targets that the brownfield pipeline cannot absorb.
A Government that has forgotten that distinction has not solved the housing crisis. It has transferred it.