Planning Reform and Productivity

Localism has dissipated, rather than handed power to 317 different local authorities. They are trying their best to come up with their version of a growth strategy and then try to agree it with their neighbours. 

This is not sustainable. Most people may not object to more housing and employment, but they will not expressly vote for it. Those who oppose will turn up and vote against it. Local politics are not localism’s ‘Big Society’ – a single district cannot determine how much growth is in the regional or national interest. 

A culture of lower growth targets now jars with an unobtainable target of 300,000 homes per year. National policy is deliberately opaque as the Government balances local objections with its obligations to house its populace and create wealth. This is why so many Local Plans fail or struggle through the system, caught in a contradictory web of regulation and policy tests. Do not underestimate the direct and indirect costs this flawed plan-making is imposing on the economy. 

The Government has tried to stimulate bottom-up strategic planning through Duty to Cooperate, City Deal and Garden Communities, but these are clunky and complex and less likely to work the more pressurised an area is. The collapse of the Joint Spatial Strategy in Oxfordshire is a case in point: we now have an important City region unable to agree its development needs.

This is why the Government has always reached for workarounds to its flagship programmes. Right from the foundation of the modern planning system in the 1940s, the Government immediately awarded sweeping planning powers to New Town Commissions, before passing the baton on to Urban Development Corporations and even the Olympic Delivery Authority. Some issues are just too important and too strategic to be left to the Big Society and voluntarism.

Without the right number of homes in the right location, a lack of labour means we are not powering the economy. Economic potential is already underestimated by a planning system that uses the rear-view mirror to predict employment trends. This is not helpful in the face of fast-moving new technologies such as AI, life sciences, renewable energy and transformation in logistics in response to rapidly changing consumer behaviour.

There is a power imbalance that needs correcting because now that power has dissipated, there is no coherent vision for national productivity. So what can be done?

First, let’s stop talking about the ‘bonfire of the regulations’. This is very tempting, but many support regulation and mitigation, particularly in the era of ecological and climate crisis. Simplification and standardisation should be pursued more vigorously (national policies are a welcome innovation), but this is a tactical response, not a strategic one. We need to unlock land supply in order to reduce the cost of planning and open up more housing choice and economic opportunity. 

For now, let’s stop asking local communities to reverse-engineer our national productivity strategy and link power to responsibility. Let’s marry these reforms with another ambitious state-led New Towns Programme: the only time we came close to meeting the Government’s target for housebuilding.