Straight to the source

The planning system is “broken”, the Conservative Party claims. Stephen Ashworth weighs up their proposals for change.

The Conservative Green Paper, Open Source Planning, proposes a "radical reboot" of the planning system. It suggests new streamlined national planning guidance, based on the Scottish and Welsh model. The Infrastructure Planning Commission will be abolished becoming, instead, part of PINS and reporting to the Secretary of State. Local plans will be developed "collaboratively" from the neighbourhood up. They will no longer have to reflect regional spatial strategies and meet any national or regional housing or employment targets; RSS will be abolished. Local authorities will be given an incentive to permit development by being allowed to keep some of the property taxes arising from new development.

On the development control side there will be a requirement for design "collaboration" (that word again) and restrictions on applicants' rights of appeal. Third parties will be given rights of appeal. There will be a presumption in favour of sustainable development (which will be locally defined) and a duty on statutory bodies to co-operate. The Community Infrastructure Levy will be abolished and replaced with a local tariff, a percentage of which will be paid to the local community.  There are populist nods to the Tory heartland with a page on enforcement, retrospective planning consents and travellers. Local housing trusts and schools will, largely, be given far greater freedoms to develop than most others.

The breadth of the review is laudable. It suggests changes from the top to the bottom of our approach to planning, many of which are sensible. There are, however, three bugs that threaten the operation of the planning system after the reboot.

First, it is naive to expect a local plan to deliver, by itself, anything other than local needs and priorities. Understandably local people plan locally and plan for themselves. The voice of the person wishing to live or work in the area is rarely heard. The involvement of business is often limited. Even if there is more encouragement for involvement that is unlikely to remedy the ill, and we will end up with a series of selfish little plans.

In reality there will still need to be a core vision for the whole local authority area and, probably, for the sub-region or economic area, within which each neighbourhood plan must play a part. In the absence of a framework the Conservative approach is unlikely to address the shortfall in housing, particularly affordable housing. It is unlikely that large-scale proposals will come forward or that contentious issues will be addressed. In some ways, even worse is the prospect of a further "reinvention" of the local plan process. The last six years has been a hellish exercise in failing to prepare core strategies and the supporting documents. The prospect of another decade of unplanned and ill planned activity is daunting.

Secondly, the proposals to restrict an applicant's right of appeal, and to give third parties a right of appeal is a recipe for chaos. The Green Paper argues that a "symmetry" is needed. This is a false premise since there is no necessary parity of interest between an investor/landowner and an objector.  In any event, the principle is not evenly applied – where is the symmetry in the local plan process? If symmetry is important then landowners and developers should have the ability to promote local plans, rather than just relying on the discretion of authorities.

If third party rights of appeal are to be included, then there also needs to be confidence that the appeal process will work quickly and fairly. Potential abuses need to be contained. Requiring third party appeals to be supported by at least 20 local people, with a "deposit" of say, £10,000 forfeited if the appeal is lost, would be one approach. There probably also needs to be an exception that allows major schemes to be pursued to appeal regardless of local plans, perhaps schemes of over 500 houses and/or creating 500 jobs? In truth, a great deal more thought is required on how the system would work in practice.

Thirdly, the proposals to abolish CIL are odd. The Conservatives supported CIL when it was promoted in the Planning Bill. They clearly intend to use a "local tariff" which, in all but name, will be CIL. Since CIL was developed "collaboratively" by a cross-sectoral group including the British Property Federation, the Local Government Association, the Planning Officers Society and the Home Builders Federation, it probably represents a reasonable, and workable, compromise approach.

Jettisoning it, and reinventing planning benefits, would be foolish and disruptive. Instead, it would be better simply to make CIL operate within the planning system (rather than semi-detached at present) and to allow local authorities a little bit more discretion to waive CIL on a case-by-case basis. Part of CIL could be set aside for the local community. With these changes CIL would then meet the main apparent aims of the Green Paper.

If the Conservative proposals can be "debugged" in these areas then there is much to applaud. Democratising the planning system is welcome. Recognising the power of harnessing tax and planning to work together is important, and if some tax raising could be relocalised that would be even better. Emphasising the importance of good quality design and sustainability, and embedding a presumption in favour of sustainable development is all good news. Hopefully, like all "open source" systems, the initial Green Paper framework will be changed, will evolve, will be improved and will work. The challenge to the Conservatives is to listen constructively and be genuinely "open" to the criticisms.

Stephen Ashworth is a consultant at Denton Wilde Sapte (www.dentonwildesapte.com).