Planning – It’s Time to Put Developers Under the Spotlight
It’s all very well developers and their lobby-ists bleating on about restrictive planning laws but isn’t it high time that the government put the squeeze on developers rather than finessing and continually mucking about with the planning system. As things stand, the sys-tem remains within the purview of local de-mocracy both through consultation in the de-velopment of the Local Plan; and after an individual application for development has been submitted. Regrettably, the government white paper announced in the Queen’s speech seeks to remove the latter entitlement.
It’s worth looking at the facts. More than 1.1 million homes that have been granted plan-ning permission over the past 10 years in England still have not been built. Analysis by the Local Government Association (LGA) shows that just over 2.78 million new homes have been given the go-ahead by councils since 2010-11, but only 58 per cent of these – just under 1.63 million – have been built, a difference of 1.15 million. Over the past dec-ade there has been a doubling in the number of permissions granted for new homes but the number of homes completed has simply not increased by the same amount.
A big myth peddled by those with vested in-terests is that even if land is allocated for housing in a Local Plan, local residents can still get the Council to prevent its develop-ment. In the real world this just doesn’t hap-pen. Residents may object to a particular scheme (as this Association has successfully done several times in the past) and if it’s bad, get the scheme rejected so that the developer has to improve it.(In this connection it should be remembered that over 90 per cent of per-missions go through without difficulty (source:LGA)).Developers know as well as planning officers what an acceptable scheme looks like, and the delay resulting from rejec-tion of a scheme is self-inflicted because the de-velopers were being greedy.
Housebuilders have a legitimate need for land-banks in order to have another con-sented site to move to as soon as a site is fin-ished. However, their business model has mutated and includes land-banking as a spec-ulative financial operation. From that view-point a site built out is a site lost. Compulsory acquisition, and sale to an enthusiastic alter-native builder, is the obvious way to end this abuse. (Section 226 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 authorises Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) for “planning pur-poses”, and Councils can sell land under Sec-tion 123 Local Government Act 1972. All that’s needed is Government advice that it would confirm such CPOs. The Government could then lend Councils the money under the same powers it uses to allow them to buy shopping centres as investments). Alternative-ly, as the Local Government Association (LGA) has urged the government, new pow-ers should be included in the planning bill to allow local authorities to charge developers full council tax on any unbuilt development as soon as the original planning permission ex-pires.
It’s gratifying to hear that the housing minister is looking at these possible solutions and it’s earnestly hoped they should be fully explored before we touch another square metre of green belt land. He should also listen careful-ly to his own backbenchers, many of whom are very resistant to the removal of local com-munity (ie democratic) involvement.