06.10.2023

Stranger than fiction: A HS2 free round-up of the last few weeks in planning

The truth may or may not be stranger than fiction, but party conference season certainly is!

This post is a round-up of some of the more interesting, unusual, or frankly bizarre planning related stories of the last two weeks.

It does not cover HS2, as that has been more than amply covered by other people - including our very own Pamela Chesterman, but there is plenty left to chew over.

1. The great intervention lottery

Let's start with some decidedly mixed messages over just how interventionist DLUHC intends to be in the run-up to the general election.

On the one hand, we have:

•  the Housing Minister promising at a Conservative Party Conference fringe event that she will continue to use her powers to intervene in Councils that do not have a local plan - much as she did in Spelthorne; and
• the Secretary of State formally intervening in Birmingham City Council, following the Council issuing a s.114 notice earlier in the year

and on the other:

• DLUHC has declined to designate any of the ten local planning authorities that Gove threatened to strip of their planning powers back in April. This decision was made despite the fact that six of the affected councils still remain below the 70 per cent target threshold for speed of decision making for non-major decisions. All ten of the Councils did, however, show an improved performance, compared to the previous quarter of data released.

This improvement was cited by DLUHC as the reason for refusing to designate, with the DLUHC website stating that:

"The Minister of State for Housing and Planning has decided to not designate any of the 10 local planning authorities previously at risk of designation as a result of improvement in performance in recent quarters to June 2023.

Should a local planning authority not continue to demonstrate good performance in determining non-major applications at a level above the required threshold, the local planning may be designated at a point in the future."

Whilst it is very hard to draw any consistent messages from many of the decisions being made at the moment. It does seem as if the current focus of DLUHC is shifting away from speed of decision making towards the level of adoption of local plans... this could be a very brave battleground for the conservatives to pick, given that many local authorities - including Spelthorne - place blame the current slowdown in Local Plan progress firmly at the government's own feet, citing the uncertainty caused by the government's inconsistent approach to planning policy reform and delays in revising the NPPF as a cause of many council's decisions to pause their plans.

This is an allegation which the Housing Minister refutes by the way. She has been cited as saying at conference earlier this week, that it was “not the case that all the local authorities have stopped local plans on the back of what we [the government] did [in proposing changes to national planning policy]”.

This is despite the fact that at least fifteen local planning authorities who have paused local plan production this year have cited the government's approach to planning policy as their reason for doing so. 

2. Who wants to walk to the shops anyway?

Next up on my list of decidedly strange events this week, is the appearance of a bona fide planning related conspiracy theory at the Conservative Party Conference and, subsequently, in government policy. 

Transport Secretary, Mark Harper, used his conference speech to attach the 'sinister' 'mis-use' of 15-minute cities by some councils in England. 

This references a conspiracy theory, which has been gaining traction in some parts of the internet, that the concept is in fact a trojan horse for a plot to lock people into small neighbourhoods and prevent them from leaving. 

The reference has since made its way into the Government's "Long term plan to back drivers", which includes the following sentence "The plans also aim to stop councils implementing so called ‘15-minute cities’, by consulting on ways to prevent schemes which aggressively restrict where people can drive."

For the record, and by way of a brief fact check,15-minute cities are not sinister, or in any way designed to restrict people's movement.

It is, instead, a handy label for a fairly dull and common sense set of urban planning principles that are intended to promote communities where local amenities- such as shops, schools or work, are easily accessible on foot or by bike.

This has, in fact, already been acknowledged by the Government. Only a few months ago, DLUHC stated, in a response to a parliamentary petition that:

"15-minute cities aim to provide people with more choice about how and where they travel, not to restrict movement. It is for a local authority to determine whether or not this is a concept they wish to propose for their local area and/or include in their Local Plan or hold a referendum on such issues."

It is, at its heart, a concept around co-location. Building homes, schools, shops and workplaces near each other to ensure that they are all easily accessible. As someone who has to drive past two more local primary schools every morning, to take her daughter to the one that we could actually get into, it is quite an appealing thought. 

The concept of a 15-minute city is wholly distinct from initiatives aimed at traffic calming or pollution reduction, which also have currently have policy support from the Government, although the Transport Secretary appears to have conflated them in a really quite unhelpful way.

Promoting active travel, walking and cycling has been a long-standing principle of the national planning policy framework (see paras 104 to 106). There has been no indication from DLUHC that this is likely to change.

It is also interesting to note that none of the initiatives announced in the 'long term plan for drivers' have anything to do with active travel initiatives. Tackling potholes, simplifying parking payment methods and reviewing guidance on 20mph zones do not in any way conflict with active travel policies.

It will be interesting to see if this changes, or this all turns out to be a storm in a teacup - albeit one that you can probably walk to within 15-minutes, if you were so minded. 

3. Breaking news: Some young people quite keen on housing

Next we have a story from the Liberal Democrat conference, which took place at the end of September.  At that conference, the leadership had proposed to drop the party's own annual housing target, which had been set at 380,000 homes a year, on the basis that such targets were 'unhelpful' and instead replace it with a target of building 150,000 new social homes a year.

This plan was roundly rejected by the party membership. The decision to keep the target appears to have been a result of the mobilisation of the younger members of the party and followed a genuinely moving and passionate debate, in which activist after activist spoke about the personal impact of the housing crisis on people's lives. 

According reporting by the BBC "members eventually backed an amendment suggested by the Young Liberals group, which said the target should be kept, to be translated into "achievable" local goals.

4. Natural Capital confusion

And finally, I can't finish without briefly mentioning the latest developments in the world of Natural Capital, and oh boy are there a lot of them.... 

Firstly, we have the delayed implementation of BNG in England. The statutory regime will now take effect in January 2024 (as opposed to next month), with small sites joining in April 2024 and NSIP sites the following year. A move which is probably best described as a belated realisation that we were running out of time to implement BNG properly.  

November will now see the publication of the long-awaited secondary legislation and accompanying guidance, including:

• the statutory biodiversity metric,
• the draft biodiversity gain plan template, 
• the Habitat Management and Monitoring Plan template, and
• a package of further Biodiversity Net Gain guidance

My overall feelings on this can probably be summed up as 'better late than never'.... but I can't help but wish that this had all happened about six months earlier.... 

Next, we have to talk about Nutrients, again.... you will all remember last month's very public defeat in the House of Lords, and the Government's subsequent announcement that:

 "In the near term, it is important that planning decision-making continues in the areas affected on the basis of the current legal framework – meaning that where mitigation is available, local authorities and developers should seek to progress sites." 

Well, we have now learned, courtesy of yet another Conservative Conference fringe event, that the Government intends to introduce a stand-alone bill to address nutrient neutrality rules as soon as humanly possible. Which means that it is likely to feature in the King's Speech in November. 

As I have previously stated, this is an idea that is likely to be easier said than done. The Government is rapidly running out of time before the next general election and, as the last few months have shown us, issues of water quality in England are extremely politically controversial...

I get the feeling that there is plenty of scope for things to get even stranger in the coming weeks.... I mean, we haven't even had the Labour party conference yet!

According to Maclean, her department knows the “state of every single local plan in the country” and the reported numbers of those delayed or paused are “not accurate”.

“We do have intervening powers,” she said, adding: “I’ve intervened only just recently and we absolutely will continue to do that.”

Planning research shows that, as of early September, a total of 30 authorities had paused, delayed or withdrawn local plans so far this year. Half of the authorities concerned cited the government’s proposed changes to national planning policy as a reason for doing so.”