Need for local support is paramount. Whose priorities must prevail? We need a debate. We also need more than 5 years. So an alliance is also needed. This will be a communications challenge. Resisting change is not an option. Are some Tory leaders a lobby for no change?
The government assumes, with a lot of support from the planning lobby, that Labour’s housing aspirations can be fulfilled by changing the planning system, introducing mandatory cross-border regional co-operation and re-introducing housing targets. The expectation is Labour’s objective of building lots more homes will then be delivered with these changes. It is a wildly optimistic assumption. The three objectives are useful, sensible and welcome changes. And also fuel the risk of war with local opponents of change. Unfortunately I do not believe these initiatives, and forthcoming changes in legislation and process will provide the large number of new homes needed. What is worse, those that are built will lack local support, not be designed and built to the standard and vernacular locals residents want, so in the future they will new reasons to oppose building locally. . And certainly this naive, regulation based thinking is not the way to build new towns, for the reasons set out in an earlier blog.
The government’s first stèps are welcome, but overlook a crucial factor. The need for local support for local change is paramount. . Simply doing more of the same shows Whitehall has failed to understand why the planning system is broken. Local communities must take back spatial control of their areas. And they must do so willingly.
So far the Labour approach assumes development control powers will suffice to build the houses numbers needed, in the time needed, to the standard needed, at the locations the communities want despite this regulatory dependent formula failing for decades. Magical solutions do not happen in planning. Replacing broken trust with renewed faith in civic success with delivery is the objective. But it must be introduced, understood and welcomed across the political divide. It is welcome the government has endorsement from the nation’s electorate. But do they also have an endorsement from local residents to mess up their local patch? To build, build and build? No, and this lack of local backing matters. Without local endorsement these worthy policy initiatives will sink into mediocrity with the millstone of local opponents who deny the link between national growth and affordable housing needs on the one hand, and ripping up the countryside near them on the other.
Reflect for a moment on the power of negative messaging. Concreting over the countryside is a powerful, deep rooted idea but foolish nightmare. But can its spirit and the zealots who believe it be ignored? The government seems to think so. Decades of local myopia and growing fear of change over fifty years has destroyed belief in civic success: that change can actually deliver change and be for the better! A favourable general election outcome is one thing. Overcoming local opponents passionate, sincere, deeply rooted belief that economic progress can happen without change near them is another debate. It has not happened. But this debate must happen before long, so Westminster based politicians can have confidence that adopting a balanced position towards the spatial debate will bring them benefits.
These are novel concepts. They need detailed thought. The prevailing wave of optimism in the planning industry is wishful thinking by some, and natural, but opportunistic grandstanding by others. The latter see another game. Snakes and ladders. They have played it before. The former forget their post-war history. So please face facts. If you employ discredited actors, or use staff who customers do not like what they see, left to their choice local residents are going to view whatever changes are proposed with scepticism or worse. There is limited trust between local local councils and most local delivery players. . How often do you see local builders working in close partnership with the council? This distrust matters and is often overlooked. The default antagonism should not come as surprise to thoughtful observers of the market. The first planning consent is often intended as a a staring point. Left to their own choices players in the market do not sign up to follow the long term, social and environmental policies of local communities to build a local community on sustainable principles. Developers, landowners, builders and option holders rightly and legitimately have one single and entirely different objective. It is to make a (trading) profit. To do so as fast as market sentiment permits. Jumping into the supply market when an opportunity is seen in a broken planning system suits them. Why not deliver some additional new, but second rate supply? Those, like the Angela Rayner and the PM aspiring to deliver first rate supply, scored highly by local residents must persuade local leaders to take back spatial responsibility for local change encourage and enable them to put in place their own clever, empowered team to deliver best in class spatial answers. When you see spatial failure, and product suppliers for whom there is little local support, when you re-write the script for their their role you as the client, responsible for the areas future must have the confidence to put the local community’s long term aspirations before those of of private owners. Many would say ‘nothing new here’ in which case why is the system broken? Why is planning not trusted? Why has failure happened? Why are house prices too high? Why are roads too crowded? In summary, why are residents resolutely opposed to local change?
Many observers seem to believe the planning consent and attached conditions will be sufficient. Yes, I recognise these new changes in process might ensure some better community outcomes are delivered too. But it will still be like pushing a boulder uphill. Except the boulder is heavier. Decades of private sector developments experience shows time and again why local trust matters, and is so often absent. . For example why are house prices unaffordable? They were not a generation ago. Why is most recent speculative housing development viewed as ugly, as an eyesore and often creates a location to be avoided if regulations attached to planning consents are sufficient to transform a failed delivery model. . Above all why is the call for sites system so flawed? By definition it invites spatial haphazardary. Regular spatail blunders poison belief in the planning system -think about Ripley airfield opposite Wisley Gardens. New homes in the middle of nowhere, justified because the land was an airfield in the woods. Think about Maidenhead golf course, in the town centre, owned by the council and due to be built over. These decision, crazy in spatial terms, justified by warped planning policy, explain the loss of trust. There will be other examples.
Wishful thinking for rapid change after years of short-sighted housing policies is understandable. But there is a trap. It cannot be delivered in one five year parliament. This is reality and it may be unpalatable, But now is the moment of opportunity to re-set the system’s time clock to match real time. Voters are looking for a solution. They must be told why that it will take time, can only be started within this five year parliament and will take a generation to deliver.
Which is why planning reality and its dependency on slow delivery needs to explained so it is understood. Best in class new build cannot be delivered by a private sector which is manned mostly by traders, not investors; whose overwhelming objective is maximising trading profit in the short term, with no long term skin in the game, only concerned with their piece of the jigsaw, unlike local residents who live with the overall built results until they die. Facts, however unpalatable must be faced and explained. Building lots of new homes needed over a generation to make prices and rents once more affordable, often in open countryside (brownfield solutions will be insufficient) without incurring the anger and enmity of local residents is a communications challenge of the highest order. Effectively it is pitting local priorities again national needs. This governance conflict needs to exposed, debated and resolved. . Who will be the winner? . Unless our leaders in Westminster and our leaders locally are very clever, and agree to work together my fear, based on seeing how bad process fails time and again over years and decades is that that both outcomes will be a grave disappointment whilst, given time and cross-party support both outcomes can be delivered to a standard that will receive acclaim.Achieving best in class will be more difficult in our confrontational system of problem solving.
In the Housing Manifesto 2024 blog first published on 29 April 2024 I argued that councils must take on direct responsibility for the future spatial distribution of uses in their areas in order to deliver their future housing vision. To do so they must take ownership of the key sites where housing might be built be the long term future, after current local plans come to an end. This entry by local councils into the role of estate managers clients and master planners clients is different, but brings with it a dividend of opportunities that increases as time passes.
The advantages that actually owning the next generation of house building land during the delivery phase is that it ensures a the long term delivery guarantee of non commercial goodies, viz lots of public open space which is loved and mantained for residents in the decades ahead, not abandoned and forgotten about following the last house sale.These dividends are the estate management ideas of land protection, master planning insights and simple civic pride that need to be explained and sold to local residents in host locations.
These estate management principles therefore first need welcome by local leaders. This is essential as they must take on the task of explaining to local residents why no change is not a possible option. Take an example. How do we convince a council leader in a rural area that his anger the number of homes in his area will be double what is stated in the current local plan is misplaced. That if his council takes spatial control within his economic catchment zone, working with his neighbours if they too are within the travel to work catchment zone, he can provide the homes that the stats say are needed and turn his residents, his voters into welcoming hosts. One local leader has already shown his true feelings. There will be lots more angry outbursts from local leaders in the weeks and months ahead.
It is far easier to explain how bad news can be turned into good news by using spatial examples, to which we can all relate. Here are two which illustrate the government’s task ahead. Wiltshire County Council leader has made his fears plain, ( BBC Radio Wiltshire Political Reporter, 5 August 2024). Can his anger be accommodated whilst also delivering the policies? And will he, and his colleagues set-up? Where is the upside for him?
Plans published on 30 July 2024 by the government show an 81% increase in the numbers of new homes expected to be built in Wiltshire Council’s area, up to 3500 per year. Richard Clewer, Wiltshire Council’s Conservative leader says it is the equivalent of building ‘another Salisbury’ over the next 15 years.He assumes that is bad news, hitting back at claims rural areas have not built enough homes. Salisbury is a town I know well. Why is another Salisbury automatically assumed to be bad news by Mr Clewer? Because I suspect in his mind he sees, and assumes we all imagine rows and rows of low density tricky tacky boxes of post WW2 suburbia. If so, I agree with him. But what if New Salisbury was medium and high density, without cars parked outside houses, terraced and mansion blocks reminding us all of the parts of central Salisbury we all love to visit, which becomes another attraction in Wiltshire? Is this possible? And can it be done without Treasury funding. Yes if you follow the right spatial examples and shrewdly manage your land value capture policy.
Mr Clewer warns that that the reforms drive ‘a bulldozer through the concept of plan-led development combined with public input. …….In Wiltshire, housing targets are rising 81%, from 1917 houses a year to 3476. ……. They are proposing a new allocation system that will dump the large majority of these houses on greenfields and, in some cases, green-belt sites in rural England. He adds that under new plans cities like London will be allowed to continue building ‘ far below their fair share of housing’. ‘Why should rural England be expected to build the houses that London cannot bring itself to build. …… The hard won requirement to make new developments ‘beautiful’ and not build more soulless estates is being dropped’.
A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government says ‘….all areas of the country must play their part. ……..Wiltshire’s target has been set objectively and is in line with local housing need. …..We cannot continue with high rents and unaffordable house prices that we see across the country’.
Unless the Ministry spokesperson was telling fibs, their response is powerful. I would like to know what Mr Clewer has said in reply but this is not reported. The two opposing points of view, each legitimate from their two points of view capture the dilemma. Who will come out on top? The answer ought to be, and is the objective of this blog, is both are happy with the outcome. . By which I mean, Wiltshire must accept its fair share of the housing its residents and their children and grandchildren will need over the generations ahead, but designed, located and built in a manner which Mr Clewer and I will look back on with satisfaction and pride. Is this possible? Not with government’s current ideas that clever, imaginative, popular, premium value generating, and sustainable new homes can be hazardly provided in locations chosen by landowners, built by developers who have no long term interest in the homes, designed by architects whose brief stops at the edge of their clients piece of land, and will have holes in infrastructure as there will not be a vision for the area created by the council and delivered by the council. At least not in Wiltshire who despite being a unitary authority and one of the biggest planning departments in England ( Planning, Ben Kochan, 8 August 2024) are struggling with providing a planning service to its residents who submit around 6000 planning app each year. Nic Thomas, director of planning at Wiltshire Council, said ‘ There was a recognition among the politicians and senior management that the planning service had been neglected and its staffing levels had been cut to the bare bone . ……The unitary authority had been created, but staffing levels had not been reviewed.’ Are these management oversights the signs of local leadership able to take on and deliver the high status and long term spatial insight that responsibility for significant urban change will require to save our rural inheritance and also deliver the homes our children and our grandchildren will need? There must be doubt. It is crucial this government with its mandate to change faces reality and designs policies that match reality, even if it means recognition that some existing actors are not good enough. Attentive hands on management and devolution working with government hand in hand may need innovative thinking.
The challenge facing the government is also starkly illustrated by a second and perhaps more weighty example. In another interesting story in Planning by Samantha Eckford, 9 August reports that a group of Conservative leaders of Home Counties councils have written a joint letter objecting to Labour’s plans to revise the standard method for assessing housing need. It seems, they suggest the new Labour government appears not to have thought about the infrastructure needed to accompany the proposed new homes and predicting a ‘furious’ backlash from residents. This is an important indication of their mind-set. Can they become spatial leaders? As they must. Can they take up and run with new devolved responsibilities which they sought from David Cameron more than a decade ago and are now on offer or are these Conservative leaders simply a powerful lobby group dressed up as democratic leaders whose role is simple-not here? Their status matters, as the signatories are leaders of Kent, Essex, Surrey,Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire county councils, and she adds all the Conservative leaders of their respective authorities. I note that neither Berkshire nor Oxfordshire authorities have participated.This is an influential lobby. But it seems also to be a lobby of partisans. Is this resistance in the best interest of their electors?
To accuse the new government of ignoring infrastructure needs, after 14 years of opposition to investment in infrastructure, whether housing, pylons, employment space or new rural open space for their communities seems to show either a high level of arrogant thinking or an inability to think ahead. There is no evidence here of a willingness to learn lessons or open the eyes of their ‘furious’ residents that even if the boomer generation can have prosperity whilst ignoring the future their children and their grandchildren cannot. Thinking and acting in this manner is not leadership, it is capitulation to terror: their electors are in a daze and they can do nothing about it. So find a phoney reason to complain, but not a out housing need as even they know that exists, and start a campaign of resistance by delay.
Looking for the positive, they say we must of course build more homes, they need the right facilities and infrastructure. Spot on. And hurrah. But whose delivery job is this? If these Home Counties leaders sincerely want to build the new homes needed who is going to take the lead in their afea, if they do not? The truth may be they are scared of their new spatial responsibility which , as they do not want to be voted out at the next local election is a good reason for seeking cross-party and cross-border long term spatial alliances to face the facts……where do the homes go after the current local plan ends, for the next two generations?
This is the sort of far-sighted spatially aware thinking residents will be thinking about. Turning away from the future will be bring an era of decay and stagnation. Both sides to the argument need to get real and listen to the other. The differences are not ideological but delivery. It may be difficult to deliver the government’s new policies with local support, but it is possible. There are fine examples to be seen.
Ian Campbell
15 August 2024
