Last week I went to a seminar on neighbourhood planning organised by our local Conservative MP, Harriet Baldwin. Like her previous seminar on rural broadband, it aimed to promote the achievements of the Government, but also revealed a great deal about how decisions are really made in our country.
The first speaker was John Howell, the Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames and the man who had developed his party’s proposals for neighbourhood planning and ‘localism’. He told us that, thanks to the Localism Act, the top-down planning associated with the previous Labour government had been abolished. Thousands of pages of detailed planning guidance had been replaced by the 60 pages or so of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Districts councils were no longer bound by the targets for new house building in each district set out in the Regional Spatial Strategies drawn up by civil servants. Instead, each district council can now specify the numbers of houses it needs, based on its own estimate of population growth. These are then written into the district council’s local development plan. Any neighbourhood plans within the district have to conform to the strategic objectives set out in the district’s plan, but can vary the details. They can, for instance, change the recommended locations for new housebuilding.
After a few more speakers enthusiastically promoted neighbourhood planning, the seminar ended with Councillor Paul Swinburn, also a Conservative and the Deputy Leader of Malvern Hills District Council. I suspect Paul has never been a fire-breathing radical, but he spoke with a polite sort of anger about the real world of planning as experienced in our district. Our version of the district development plan has been developed in co-operation with two other district councils and is called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP). After an elaborate series of consultation meetings, it has been forwarded to the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for an assessment by a planning inspector. A planning inspector is a civil servant acting in a ‘quasi-judicial capacity’ (ie he pretends to be an independent arbiter). The planning inspector will oversee an even more elaborate consultation process, until the SWDP is finally approved in about a year’s time. Paul said that while this process is underway, Malvern Hills and the other two district councils are receiving numerous planning applications from developers who propose to build houses on sites not specified in the SWDP. When the district councils turn down these applications, they are approved on appeal by a planning inspector on the grounds that the district council has failed to identify an adequate ‘five year land supply’.
The NPPF requires each district council to identify a ‘five year land supply’ (ie sites which have been approved for housing development sufficient to meet the estimated need for new houses over the next five years). But who decides the number of houses needed for the next five years? The planning inspectors could use the detailed estimates in the SWDP which, although not finally approved, has been agreed by the elected representatives of over 286,000 people in South Worcestershire. But the decisions of our elected representatives count for little with planning inspectors, who are continuing to use the higher figures from the old Regional Spatial Strategy, even though these have (allegedly) been abandoned by the Government.
Clearly, there are two worlds of local planning: there is reality, as experienced by the residents of South Worcestershire, in which housebuilding corporations can build what they like where they like; and there is the Wonderland of triumphant localism inhabited by some members of Parliament.
See also: How green was my village
Confessions of a parish councillor
The first speaker was John Howell, the Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames and the man who had developed his party’s proposals for neighbourhood planning and ‘localism’. He told us that, thanks to the Localism Act, the top-down planning associated with the previous Labour government had been abolished. Thousands of pages of detailed planning guidance had been replaced by the 60 pages or so of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Districts councils were no longer bound by the targets for new house building in each district set out in the Regional Spatial Strategies drawn up by civil servants. Instead, each district council can now specify the numbers of houses it needs, based on its own estimate of population growth. These are then written into the district council’s local development plan. Any neighbourhood plans within the district have to conform to the strategic objectives set out in the district’s plan, but can vary the details. They can, for instance, change the recommended locations for new housebuilding.
After a few more speakers enthusiastically promoted neighbourhood planning, the seminar ended with Councillor Paul Swinburn, also a Conservative and the Deputy Leader of Malvern Hills District Council. I suspect Paul has never been a fire-breathing radical, but he spoke with a polite sort of anger about the real world of planning as experienced in our district. Our version of the district development plan has been developed in co-operation with two other district councils and is called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP). After an elaborate series of consultation meetings, it has been forwarded to the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for an assessment by a planning inspector. A planning inspector is a civil servant acting in a ‘quasi-judicial capacity’ (ie he pretends to be an independent arbiter). The planning inspector will oversee an even more elaborate consultation process, until the SWDP is finally approved in about a year’s time. Paul said that while this process is underway, Malvern Hills and the other two district councils are receiving numerous planning applications from developers who propose to build houses on sites not specified in the SWDP. When the district councils turn down these applications, they are approved on appeal by a planning inspector on the grounds that the district council has failed to identify an adequate ‘five year land supply’.
The NPPF requires each district council to identify a ‘five year land supply’ (ie sites which have been approved for housing development sufficient to meet the estimated need for new houses over the next five years). But who decides the number of houses needed for the next five years? The planning inspectors could use the detailed estimates in the SWDP which, although not finally approved, has been agreed by the elected representatives of over 286,000 people in South Worcestershire. But the decisions of our elected representatives count for little with planning inspectors, who are continuing to use the higher figures from the old Regional Spatial Strategy, even though these have (allegedly) been abandoned by the Government.
Clearly, there are two worlds of local planning: there is reality, as experienced by the residents of South Worcestershire, in which housebuilding corporations can build what they like where they like; and there is the Wonderland of triumphant localism inhabited by some members of Parliament.
See also: How green was my village
Confessions of a parish councillor
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