About a fortnight ago (21 February 2025) I wrote briefly about the call for sites methodology (yes, horrid word, please suggest better) local councils use when preparing new draft local plans. I knew it was and is a crazy system for deciding important spatial decisions by local councils about local land use change. Remember that the current local plan system excludes local councils acting as land supply enablers. Instead it is rather like saying to your newly acquired puppy feel free to poo and pee where you like. Abdication of spatial leadership duties is policy omission of high order. This appalling defect has seemed so plain that I assumed the Alice in Wonderland characteristics of such a silly spatial policy would be obvious to others too. This week exchanges on LinkedIn have woken me up. How wrong I am. Here is the gist.
The exchanges kicked off with a post from Team Leader (Development Plans Strategy Projects) at MHCLG Max Laverack announcing (27 February 2025) a ‘Planning overhaul to speed up and simply local plans’ confirming the government intends to roll out a new local plan system by the end of 2025, to accelerate plan-making. And make local council produced local plans shorter, clearer, and easier to use. Good, but silence on spatial silence. The government intends to retain the broken spatial system which empowers the ‘haves’ lobby group to continue to fleece the ‘have nots’ silent majority. This oversight is shameful. So I wrote on LinkedIn this Comment in response..
’Relying on the plan-led system maybe government policy. But it is flawed. It is discredited. At its heart continuing this spatial procedure, which determines where new housing will go, because it relies on the ‘call-for-sites’ means of identifying and distributing future housing, government house building targets are doomed. As a local land supply policy it is haphazard, and driven by private commercial priorities not by local communities social and civic preferences. Talk about putting the cart before the horse! Put simply it is policy abdication by local councils of their spatial and land supply duties. And as a policy CFS explains why the planning system is not trusted by the public.’
Full credit to Max Laverack who promptly pushed me back, saying
’Thanks Ian, there’s a lot in there. Take a look at the consultation response and hopefully you’ll find some things in there that will support improvement in some of those areas. And more consultation is planned later this year.’.
To which I replied that I will do so and then yesterday responded as follows.
‘I have, and am glad to backtrack …… in some regards. The Minister says the plan-led approach is, and must remain the cornerstone of our planning system. Correctly they are said to be the framework to determine where houses and infrastructure should be built. But they they do not decide where the houses are to be built, do they? Instead landowners make these decisions, don’t they? So the local plan is built on a misnomer, isn’t it? Spatial decisions about land use change need to be made locally, by councils representing the long term priorities. So why are they made by private landowners with private priorities driven by profit and not driven by local desires? This crazy game of land use hazard also forfeits most of the land use capture. Seems elementary to me. Local communities create local value. Local communities should get it back. Perhaps it is fear of accusations of the nationalisation of land use. And it is. Four decades of a market led system of house supply has failed. Time to face facts.’.
These exchanges produced one or two other useful comments. There seems to be a massive resistance to placing in the lap of local councils responsibility for deciding spatial policy in their areas. But until this happens public trust in the planning system will continue to decline. Local councils must become their own master planners. And in areas of high land values local councils must become the buyers of next generation land and sellers of this generation of land with consent to build.
The existing CFS system is tainted with potential for spatial error and places short term blinkers on decision takers whose duty is to look one or two generations ahead whilst delivering the policy priorities of today’s Westminster government. To make the point that local political party rivalries distort the focus on spatial long term civic duties, perhaps all members of political parties should be barred from standing as local councillors?
Ian Campbell
2 March 2025
