Arguably the most significant and contested policy reform in this period was the ‘localisation’ of housing policy and delivery to LPAs from the strategic regional level post-2010. Previously housing figures had been calculated and distributed to individual LPAs by their regional government. The post-2010 system is characterised by the need for LPAs to meet an ‘Objectively Assessed Need’ (henceforth OAN) based on the forecast demographic housing needs within the locality, and to provide a continuous supply of land to support housing development through demonstrating a ‘Five Year Land Supply’ (herein 5YLS).
The political rhetoric around the removal of regional government and shift to localism seemed to promise greater local control over housing numbers, which LPAs with restrictive planning approaches interpreted as an opportunity to put downward pressure on their figures; however, the new system under the NPPF resulted in LPAs being forced to accept more housing to satisfy their OAN and 5YLS.
These reforms were highly contentious because in nearly all cases the localised OAN and 5YLS housing targets were (significantly) higher in a number of South-East locations (typically with strong market pressures and local resistance) than the housing figures set out in the previous regional distributions.
This ‘locally-imposed’ increase in housing was politically abhorrent for elected members and planners in LPAs that had hitherto practiced a restrictive planning approach within their locality. Furthermore, for a significant number of tightly bounded town and city LPAs, and those containing large areas of environmental protection, the new higher housing targets could not be fully accommodated within their administrative boundaries. This resulted in a reliance on neighbouring authorities to meet their unaccommodated housing need, but without any strategic level coordination or resolution mechanism.
In practice, these situations often created strong local political tensions between neighbouring councils.
As a result, these tensions were often (deliberately or otherwise) left unresolved until the Local Plan examination process for individual local councils; with the most common reasons for plans being found
‘unsound’ being inadequate housing target provision based on OAN/5YLS over the plan period and a failure to provide evidence of meeting the duty to cooperate primarily in regard to local housing issues:
“[T]he removal of the regional level and the loss of the housing figure for each area means that we have spent huge amounts of time and money looking at housing numbers, which has delayed the production of the Local Plan. And it means that in the examination you have quite a big focus on the housing numbers when it should have been decided somewhere else. I think, you know, many years before there should be a figure set and that is what you plan for; and that would remove all those issues at every single examination.
But that has been one of the largest implications of the removal of the regional planning level for us” (SP4, Rural, East England).
172
The case was made that when LPAs were provided with a housing figure from the regional level it was
‘politically helpful’ because local actors could then pass the blame upwards for hard political decisions:
“There needs to be some structure there, and it’s just not working, I think, at the moment…I'm not saying it was perfect before, it wasn’t; but I do think it put the whole planning and delivery in reverse for a while, by scrapping the regional spatial strategy and the targets that everybody had in those plans. And the helpfulness of always having somebody to blame from above, politically, actually it was a kind of get out. But it is so much harder for councils to commit to their numbers; and the capacity, and the fighting and the energy that is locked up in the process we have now is wasteful. It is slowing it down, it is not really serving, in my view, the planning process, the communities we are trying to plan for now and in future, particularly well” (SP17, Urban, South East).
Moreover, beyond the pragmatic local political advantages of receiving a housing figure from above for councillors to redirect blame for housing development; the wider experience of the ‘slow’ and ‘painful’
process of LPAs being involved in the production of a larger-than-local strategy over many years (2004-2010) only to have them abolished before many regional spatial strategies (RSS) were even completed had undermined members political faith in strategic planning and made them reluctant to ‘try again’:
“The very strong message we are getting though from the politicians is they don’t want to see another Regional Spatial Strategy thank you very much; because it took up an awful lot of effort, took many, many years to actually agree, and didn’t really make that much of a difference anyway in the big scheme of things because the government abolished it” (SP22, Major Urban, North East).
This expressed lack of faith in strategic planning in England at both the national and local political levels has potential implications for deprofessionalisation, particularly as a number of experienced ‘spatial’
planners have since left the profession/system and are unlikely to be replaced either through planning schools or training within remaining strategic practice settings under such localist economic governance.
It also brings into question whether the removal of RSSs and RG was as much politically motivated at the national and local levels as technically and economically justified as a ‘failed’ policy programme.
These practice challenges around the localisation of housing numbers became particularly acute in cases where urban LPAs could not meet their OAN housing figure within their own tightly constrained boundaries. Often such urban councils were penned-in by greenbelt and greenfield land under the legal authority of neighbouring LAs, meaning such constrained councils effectively became reliant on their surrounding neighbouring authorities to help assist with their ‘housing shortfall’. As the need to meet
173
OAN had typically increased the housing figures for LPAs across the board, few councils demonstrated a willingness to take on more housing from other places (critically undermining the Duty to Cooperate).
Furthermore the irony was that the urban areas with the most potential for growth were also the ones most constrained by historic administrative boundaries and greenbelt designations to prevent urban sprawl into the countryside. As such, the status and extent of greenbelt protection/designations around urban (growth) areas became a widely controversial and emotive issue for planning during this period:
“[W]e are relatively constrained in terms of our boundary…and we have limited areas of Greenbelt for expansion…we are proposing to release about 350 hectares of Greenbelt so that our Development Plan can accommodate the [council] housing need, which is about 51,000 as the figure that we can actually accommodate within [city], but our actual housing need is 89,000…the [OAN] argument for us is only meaning that we have had to go into the Greenbelt; but whether it is 69,000, 79,000, 89,000 or 109,000 it doesn’t really make a lot of difference because you could build on every bit of Greenbelt in [council] and you still wouldn’t hit the number…and so that leaves a big number that need to be found from outside…[which] becomes more of a problem for our neighbours…the reality of it is they [combined authority] love talking about economic growth, “fantastic”, but dealing with the housing that goes with it, “oh, we don’t want to talk about that”…so the only reason you are doing a Local Plan is to deal with the Greenbelt…[but] the public don’t like the release of Greenbelt, mainly because the government isn’t very clear on what the role of the Greenbelt is and that it can be released if you have pressing needs…So that is problem number one” (SP11, Major Urban, West Midlands).
“We are doing quite a lot of work on urban intensification. We are doing a very detailed pieces of work about how we can up - so we have already got a trajectory of housing delivery, we have got planning permissions already granted for about 20,000. We are trying to find another 12,000 through inefficient use of land, converting industrial to residential, reconfiguring roads and areas. So we are trying to do an urban intensification, over and above the sites we have already allocated, to max out what you can do in the urban area to minimise what you need to splurge out into the Greenbelt and beyond…there is quite an interesting debate because the adjoining authorities particularly have got this real sense that you must protect the Greenbelt. The issue for [council] is that we would rather see development on the edge of [city] than jump over the Greenbelt. Because the problem with jumping the Greenbelt is the transport and sustainability needs, because most people still choose to come in and work in [city], so the further away you put people and housing the harder it is to make their transport sustainable” (SP36, Urban, South West).
“So, for example, Luton is completely constrained and an economic generator with nowhere to put housing, so how does it then have a sensible conversation with an adjoining authority to say, “We have 11,000 houses and we don’t know where to put them?”. The adjoining authority is going to say, “Well you can’t put them here, we have our own need”, so how are you going to resolve that?” (SP6, Rural, South East).
174
At the same time, the central government and development industry continued to strongly argue that the sluggish pace of development is a direct result of cumbersome planning regulations and procedures.
However, the SPs made the point almost unanimously that developers controlled both the speed and delivery of housing sites, and not LPAs or the planning system. From their perspective, the main delivery challenge was that developers would only build to the pace of their business model to ensure high local house prices and sales values; even where LAs had an up-to-date Local Plan and had allocated land with planning permission above the required level to meet OAN/5YLS for development within their boundary:
“[T]he development industry are trying to stop plans getting adopted, because that is in their interest to sort of gain control of supply, and when they control the supply that washes back into the planning process. So they are controlling [housing] delivery. It’s not planning or the plan preparation that’s actually controlling supply, its developers; and I think the government have, you know, patently just failed to tackle that” (SP7, Urban, East Midlands).
Here it is suggested that volume developers have enough power and legal tools to subvert planning policy and practices that attempt to influence more control over housing supply and delivery. It was frequently argued that the government’s assessment that the planning system is a persistent barrier to housing development presents a partial view of the problem and ignores the practices and business models of volume housing developers that stand to gain from land banking and transactions (holding onto land with permission as a reserve in the development pipeline or expecting an increase in value) and paced delivery rates to maintain housing scarcity and product value (Cochrane et al., 2015).
These findings are consistent with the academic literature. In the context of housing development in a Sustainable Urban Extension (SUEs) within a UK growth region, Cochrane et al. (2015) explain “Spatial plans that, on paper, appeared to present resolutions to strategic problems have not proved a sufficient catalyst [on their own] to impel on-site delivery” and “there is little evidence that private house-builders have any particular interest in meeting housing need, nor that their business model would encourage them to do so”; which highlights the “continuing gap between ambitions to use planning as a driver of development and delivery in practice” (p. 13). This has strong implications for practitioners, in terms of professionalism and public trust, that are attempting to direct change in an ostensibly ‘plan-led’ system.
It was also frequently acknowledged by the PMs that LAs do not actually build the houses but get the blame for slow delivery and under-supply. From the SPs perspective, the developers are in control of the supply of housing and work according to their business model and not OAN/5YLS housing targets or the Local Plan. The lack of mechanisms for councils to use to incentivise or discipline landowners and
175
developers to increase delivery rates was a key theme, with the power to enforce financial incentives through taxes and for local Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) being frequently proposed solutions:
“Now that results in us [local councils] not getting as many houses built as we have given planning permission for, and we can’t force a builder to build them. Now I’ve suggested to central government, since they tend to use legislation to correct people’s behaviour, well if you really mean business; what you would say to a developer is, “You have got planning permission to build 1000 houses”, and then you would say, depending on the size of the site, we [government] would say, “We believe you should build 500 in the first year and 500 in the second. And to make sure that you do, at the end of the first year council tax at the rate of 20% becomes payable on the first 500 houses, and at the end of the second year council tax becomes payable on the second 500”. You now have a real incentive to build these houses and then sell them, because that way the purchaser takes over the council tax requirement and not you [the developer]…But whilst government are very interested in that, they have been reluctant to actually do it because that would seriously piss-off Barretts, Persimmons and the other big housing developers…So government hasn’t as yet shown that they are willing to help us” (SP3, Urban, South East).
“To be frank, we [local councils] either need to be given genuine power and money to be able to get involved in the development industry and actually effectively be developing ourselves, or at least investing in development ourselves, and that is gradually coming from government, but very, very, very gradually. Or the system needs to be changed so that as planning, as regulatory authorities, we have the genuine ability to make someone build, to control and supply more actively. So, yeah, we actually would welcome some sort of system whereby a contract was put in place at the point of permission. That if a planning permission was granted due to lack of supply particularly, so if it was granted on the basis of a five-year land supply, then there should be a contract in place that the site is coming forward and will be built within a defined time period; and if it isn’t, they lose the commission or they pay significant penalties. We need to have either the carrot or the stick, and at this point we don’t really have either” (SP15, Urban, West Midlands).
“I have fed back in a number of government consultations the CPO process. All right, so you give permission for someone to build some houses and then they sit on that permission;
but they dig a drain and discharge the conditions so the value of that land is retained. Quite simply, if they do not build the houses within a given period of time, and I don’t just mean the length of the planning permission, then you could ratchet that down a bit more. I just think the local government should be able to CPO at half the market value. Then as a house builder you are going to say, “I’m not just going to sit on this piece of land because the longer I sit on it, ultimately, it is going to be worth 50% less”. But I just feel there is too much lobbying by the Home Builders Federation and the private sector that the Government are a little blindsided, because the problem is always the planners” (SP26, Urban, Yorkshire and the Humber).
These points highlight a need to strengthen planning agency by providing policy mechanism/tools to boost negotiation with volume developers; however, this approach goes against the current tide of national planning reforms which has weakened the capacity of planners through policy deregulations such as viability assessments and PDRs. Nonetheless, the PMs also expressed some sympathy with
176
developers over the difficulties of purchasing land at a reasonable/viable price through the land market, also noting the problem of typically high financial expectations of landowners to sell for development:
“I would want to see…the Mayor having strong CPO powers…we give these sites permission in principle for those landowners, and we give them three years; and if after three years they have not been built then the Mayor should have the power to take the site off them…[because] I can point to two examples where we have had developers who have put money into bids to buy sites, and they basically need to pay more than the actual market value; because we have done our own market value, so we know what it costs and we know what they have offered, and the landowner won’t sell. So that is a huge frustration, because it is those sites that are sitting there that are a blight to residents, that the developer wants to build, and the landowner won’t sell” (SP39, Major Urban, North West).
In this context, SPs emphasised the need for a strong strategic body or actor, such as a Combined Authority or Elected Mayor, to enforce a system of local CPOs (see ATLAS) to hold land owners and developers to account for delivery; and to support atomised, weakly-resourced and deregulated LPAs under austerity localism, largely operating without strategic planning institutions and policy tools post-2010. SP26 was the most critical of the way that national policy served to problematize the role of LPAs in development delivery whilst ignoring the crucial role of developers and landowners in the process:
“[T]he latest consultations they [government] did on…a technical planning consultation on the NPPF…they stated they were considering introducing a delivery test. And that delivery test was only going to be imposed on local authorities. And I was like, ‘Right so we have given them the permissions, what more can we do, how have we failed the delivery test?’.
We cannot make the developer build their houses unless we are the landowner and we have got some contractual agreement in place. Yet there was no reference at all about,
‘Well we need to look at who actually should be delivering’, and that is the developer or the landowner. No reference to the delivery test being imposed on them and any sanctions falling on them in any way. I was just aghast” (SP26, Urban, Yorkshire and the Humber).
This ‘housing delivery test’ for LPAs has subsequently been developed by national government in the 2017 Housing White Paper and revised 2018/9 NPPF; however, whilst these documents pay slightly more attention to the role of developers and landowners in the process, there has been much less emphasis and specified policy obligations placed on these actors. This issue of housing build out rates was also dealt with in the Letwin Review (MHCLG, 2018) that considered that ‘the homogeneity of the
This ‘housing delivery test’ for LPAs has subsequently been developed by national government in the 2017 Housing White Paper and revised 2018/9 NPPF; however, whilst these documents pay slightly more attention to the role of developers and landowners in the process, there has been much less emphasis and specified policy obligations placed on these actors. This issue of housing build out rates was also dealt with in the Letwin Review (MHCLG, 2018) that considered that ‘the homogeneity of the