Author: carrick

Is sewage infrastructure blocking the flow of new housing delivery?

July 10th, 2013

The pro-development approach of the NPPF has helped to bring about rapid new growth in housing development in some parts of England. This resurgence is involving sites, more often than not, in locations that are not allocated for housing, or indeed any development.

This can, in some places, put new pressures on infrastructure and the planning system has its ways and means, through CIL (for the moment!) and Section 106 agreements, to address these impacts.

One area of infrastructure untouched by such measures, however, is the local sewage network.

Section 106 of the Water Industry Act 1991 places a duty on water authorities to accept new connections to their sewage systems. Their ability to reject such connections is limited to very specific circumstances, such as where the connecting pipe does not meet the requisite standards.

The practical effect of this is therefore that, on payment of a relatively low fixed fee, a developer may connect to a mains sewer regardless of whether the sewer system has the capacity to accommodate the additional flows.

The water authority therefore has no means of stopping the system becoming overloaded. Of course, if it does get overloaded and foul water escapes from the sewage system, the water authority is liable of a criminal offence under Section 85 of the 1991 Act and European law.

The duty to make sure that the system can cope with the demands placed upon it falls squarely on the water authority.

Section 94 of the 1991 Act requires water authorities to provide, improve and extend the system of public sewers so as to ensure that the area is effectually drained.

Unless drainage works are required to serve a single development alone (rather than, say, improvement of existing mains infrastructure) the cost of such improvement works falls on the water authority itself.

Given that this almost certainly involves new infrastructure and considerable spending, forward planning of requirements is essential.

In this regard, the development plan identifies anticipated housing growth and locations and the SHLAA will give some clear indication of likely housing pressures for the future. We are told that the water authorities take all of these into account in their infrastructure plans – so if housing is in the planning pipeline, then there should be the pipelines to accommodate it.

The housing growth that we are seeing at the moment is however, to a significant extent, not in locations anticipated by development plans and so in many places the infrastructure plans are inadequate or out of sync with actual development.

Insofar as the water authorities have no real powers themselves to stop or delay development, the planning system has, in some locations, stepped in to assist. This is typically done through Grampian conditions that require there to be sewage capacity to be demonstrated before new houses are occupied.

Eminently sensible, one might say. Except of course that the effect of such a condition is in all too many cases, a ransom position in the favour of the water authority.

They are described as “authorities” but the reality is of course that they are private companies with a duty to make profits for their own shareholders. They have no real interest in delivering new housing or the jobs that it brings or any particular desire to be forced into building new, un-forecast sewage infrastructure that will impact on forecast profit levels. They cannot be criticised for that – it is the logical effect of their privatisation all those years ago.

What is more concerning is that the water authorities have become increasingly aware of the position of power they hold in respect of large planning applications and seem to be seeing this as a lucrative new revenue stream.

Knowing that a Grampian condition is a real problem for housing developers, most water authorities now charge fees of several hundred pounds for telling you what existing capacity levels are at. One would really have thought they would have such data at the tips of their fingers.

If that is not bad enough, if it is determined that there is a shortfall in capacity, they will charge many thousands of pounds to scope out what works are required to address it.

In such cases the water authorities know that developers won´t and can´t just take a Grampian condition and sit and wait for them to undertake the necessary improvements to the sewage system. Instead, a simple choice is presented – the developer pays to get the improvements early, or the development can´t go ahead.

At no stage does the duty under Section 94 of the Act, for the water authorities themselves to meet the local drainage needs, seem to come into play.

To some, this is a pragmatic way of bringing forward new infrastructure at the cost of those who will benefit from it. To others, it looks like pure and simple cash generation by greedy water companies.

Whatever your point of view, this disconnect between development aspirations and certainty of mains sewage infrastructure presents a major blockage to the actual delivery of much needed housing.
Some local planning authorities have shown their mettle by refusing to impose conditions on new development requiring sewage capacity to be demonstrated.

The stark choice for the water authority in such circumstances is to bring forward the necessary improvements or face overflow problems and the fines that will result. However, that local authorities should have to risk sewage overflow to get the water authorities to act is not exactly a vote winner with the electorate.

It is clear that government has to take a look at this and find a more workable, efficient and cost effective means of delivering the sewage infrastructure required for this new wave of development that it is encouraging. Sewage is not something that one can brush under the carpet, Mr Pickles.

Development Plans – Is it time they joined the dodo?

March 11th, 2013

The development plan has been the cornerstone of planning decisions for as long as most people can remember. As students we were always taught that the development plan and planning decisions were inseparable – a mantra reinforced by successive changes to legislation that have placed development plans as the starting point for all decisions.

Yet in recent years the development plan seems in many places to have lost its place on the desk of development control officers. That’s not to say that development plans have ever been a ‘must read’ for development control planners – in our experience, many planners outside of local plan departments have never really held much regard for the development plan. However, as development control officers have moved into a new era of development management, the disconnect has become more pronounced.

The criticisms of development plans are well rehearsed, but still worth repeating. Despite protestations from the Clear English society, most plans remain woolly, cut and paste jobs of badly worded national guidance but with inferior grammar. Not current national guidance, of course. As development plans take an unfeasibly long time to prepare they are typically inconsistent with prevailing national guidance within weeks of being published.

The strength of development plans ought to be in providing a clear steer on local development. However, all too often the assessments of employment land, retail need and housing numbers upon which they are based are woefully out of date. Even when they are not, they often display a dazzling ignorance of the real world. Almost every development plan zones vast areas of land for inward industrial investment despite the fact thateven our indigenous manufacturing is on the wane. Virtually no development planin the country identifies areas for trade counters and car garages even though they form a significant part of our traditional industrial areas. Large sites continue to be allocated for bulky goods retailing when anyone in the industry will tell you that in many regions of the UK there is now significant oversupply of space for such activities.

The lack of commerciality indevelopment plans and in some development plan departments is truly astounding. Indeed, the only commerciality that seems to stray into the ivory towers of local plan departments these days seems to be where local authority land is concerned. That the local authority owns a site apparently makes it ideal for all sorts of valuable development.

So where does the effort in preparing local plans go? I am sure that there are some officers working incredibly hard behind the scenes to put these documents together. However, one really has to question the balance of effort expended between the content and the branding, inane photographs and translating the index into multifarious languages. While there has always been a question mark over the realism of development plans, prior to the 2004 Planning and Compensation Act there was at least the opportunity to bring areality check to the plans through cross examination of local plan officers and objectors at local plan inquiries.

The fear of having to defend policies at inquiry against the onslaught of a rabid QC was a sure-fire incentive to make sure that the policies and allocations of a plan were written with a semblance of sense. It was bloody and painful but the end result was a plan that, at least for the few months following its adoption, could be said to be reasonably realistic. If the Local Plan inquiry was Schwarzenegger then the LDF / LDP process that came in following the 2004 Act was Mr Muscle. On a bad day.

The Local Plan system was a no holds barred investigation into whether the draft plan was the best that could be achieved. The LDF system (Yes I know it has been renamed, but it is still the LDF to many..) starts with the assumption that the draft plan is the best that can be achieved and challenges objectors to prove that it isn’t “sound”. Pure Sir Humphrey. With some limited exceptions, the choice for the Inspector is accept the plan, kick part of it out or kick it all out.

In other words, the Inspector’s role is now not to facilitate delivery of the best plan for an areabut to test whether the plan is bad enough to be binned. In my experience of the’new’ system Inspectors and objectors do have a fair stab at scrutinising the local planning authority’s case. It is however a poke with a tickling stick rather than the cleaving of the broadsword of the previous system.

The result is that many of the plans coming through the system are not a sound platform for future development but glossy brochures of meaningless, anodyne drivel that is out of date the day it is published and woefully out of touch with either what business and developers or local people want and need. The yawning reality gap leftby development plans is now being filled, in England, by neighbourhood plans. Despite the requirement that a neighbourhood plan complies with the development plan for an area, in those areas where they are being progressed you would be forgiven for thinking that they are designed to replace it.

It seems then that the development plan in its current form is an endangered species – and while development plans officers remain in their ivory towers oblivious to the real world around them, it is not a species that many people outside of local plans departments are particularly keen to protect. Unless something is done quickly to make the development plan system up to date, relevant and realistic, then it is surely headed the way of the dodo.

We are on the highway to Hell – but will there be sufficient parking when we get there?

December 21st, 2012

Planners have faced a lot of criticism recently for holding up development and failing to recognise the realities of the economic crisis on the property sector. Some of this criticism is well founded. There are still far too many local authority dinosaurs out there.

The reality is however that much of the delay and frustration caused to developers these days comes not from planners but the consultees to whom the local authorities turn for comments on new applications. Firstly, there are those all powerful quangos such as the Environment Agency, Highway Agency and CADW who quite frankly aren’t in the least bit interested in economic development and turning planning applications around quickly. In the spectrum of slowing development, these are truly the ceramic brakes of the bunch – so much so that they deserve their own blog article in the new year.

Today however our musings centre on probably the most frustrating of all consultees – the highway development control officer. In our congested nation traffic chaos is the fear of all local councillors, and so the views of the highway officer is pretty central to most applications.

Highway development control officers know the power they have over planners and committees. A jab of PICADY, a left hook of ARCADY and an uppercut of TRICS sends most committees running to the hills to escape the Mayan-esque prophecies of terminal gridlock and being trapped into doing perpetual circuits of a supermarket car park looking for a parking space.

As far as consultees go, when these chaps (and unfortunately they are mainly chaps) enter the ring that is the committee room, they are Mike Tyson. With a beard and a penchant for fluorescent jackets, obviously. The planning officer doesn’t stand a chance. Given just how important these demi-gods are to the planning process, one would have thought they have a clearly defined role in statute, regulations, or at least some form of policy, somewhere. It appears not.

As a consequence, while planners have strict statutory periods in which to determine planning applications (compliance with which can influence the grant that their department secures) highways officers are not subject to any particular obligation to respond, or to respond in a timely manner to any application. While planners are required to take full account of the overall objectives of national policy to support economic development and to take a pragmatic approach in balancing economic, social and environmental issues, with rare exception, highway officers have a book of manuals and parking standards that must be complied with rigidly, come what may.

Perhaps worst of all is that while planners are obliged to consider the scheme that is presented to them, for some reason even when presented with technically acceptable highway solutions, highways officers appear often to want to substitute their own ideas, without any regard or understanding of the developer’s constraints. The result is fantastic situations where applications are delayed by months while highway officers procrastinate; where developments are forced to provide car parking that they don’t need; and where economic development creating new jobs is frustrated because the technically acceptable highway solution is not the preferred one of the officer involved.

The worst thing of all is that there isn’t much that an applicant can do about any of this. Appeal takes time and is costly, and cost isn’t something anyone wants at this moment in the economic cycle.
This is hardly an acceptable arrangement. For years Government has said it would try and formalise the roles and responsibilities of consultees such as this, and indeed WG is apparently considering such issues in the new Planning Bill for Wales. In the meantime, all we can really do therefore is smile, perhaps pass a nice word about the officer’s fluorescent jacket and hope for the best.

Time for a bit of strategic thinking…

December 4th, 2012

As the planning system in England tends to the wounds caused by the brawling between CALA homes and the egregious Mr Pickles over the role and form of regional planning, there is growing unrest on the Welsh side of the border over the lack of strategic direction on areas such as housing growth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in south east Wales, where the Welsh Government’s population forecasts indicate that in the period to 2023 Cardiff will grow at a rate of between twice and six times that of immediately adjoining authorities. At the Welsh Government rates, the population of the city will grow by one third from 2012 to 2026. The implications of this have been crystallised in the recently published Preferred Strategy for Cardiff, which forms the basis of the new LDP for the city. This shows that, even adopting a lower rate of growth than the Welsh Government suggests, there is a need for 37,100 new dwellings over the plan period of which 18,250 dwellings must be located onto greenfield sites.

Cardiff is bounded to the south by the sea, to the west by the River Ely, to the east by flood plain and green belt and to the north by the M4. To accommodate such significant growth means filling in the few large green spaces left in the city with allocations of up to 6,000 new dwellings at a time. Naturally, residents of these areas are in revolt over the plans. The city’s arcane road and public transport infrastructure is creaking already. Even if the Council’s rose tinted expectation that 50% of residents will travel by non-car modes is realised, such huge change will make Cardiff a very different place. It also begs the question as to what will happen post 2026. By that point, Cardiff will, quite simply, be full up. If ever there was a need for a strategic, regional approach in south east Wales, now would be the time for it. We have the Wales Spatial Plan but quite frankly, that is about as useful as the proverbial cat flap in the elephant house.

The Welsh Government has commissioned research to look at the interrelationship between the various towns and authorities of Wales. A key recommendation of the ‘City Regions’ report – the first recommendation, in fact – is that housing planning be organised at a city region rather than at a local authority level and linked to transport planning to facilitate commuting. Against this advice, it is rather surprising that the Welsh Government is standing by and letting Cardiff struggle with accommodating its forecast new housing growth, especially when adjacent authorities have both the space and in some cases the inclination to accommodate more of Cardiff’s overspill. It is also rather bizarre that, having invested millions in the regeneration of the valley communities over the past decades, the Welsh Government seems to be doing little to channel positively the attraction of the Cardiff city region to create new jobs and housing in adjoining valley areas.

Granted, such a strategy may not draw all of the development pressure from Cardiff, nor should it, but as these areas benefit from the success of being in the capital region, there is surely some sense in sharing the burden of that role also. With Cardiff’s plan at its early stages and the plans of a number of adjoining authorities yet to be adopted, now would seem an opportune time for the Welsh Government to act on the findings of its own research and give some clear strategic guidance on how the Cardiff city region ought to grow.

It is time to show what Cardiff Bay can do. Or should it now be renamed Toothless Tiger Bay?

Travel back in time with the Planning Portal…

November 24th, 2012

A few years ago, a young upstart on the graduate entry programme told the mandarins in Whitehall about this wonderful new fangled thing called the world wide internet super highway and how it could change the world. Most of the boffins just harrumphed loudly and then settled back to sipping sherry and reading the Financial Times. It WAS after 4pm, after all.

At the back of the room however, one of the mandarins took a moment to absorb the news of this new development. Perhaps, yes perhaps, this youngster was onto something. Perhaps this was the thing that would change the world’s view on bureacracy. Better still, perhaps this could make his own profession, planning, popular and sexy……

…and the Planning Portal was born.

Save paper, time and money by submitting planning applications on-line. A simple message. Who could not just love it?

Well me, for a start. I detest it.

Take the application submission interface. Yes, please take the interface. If you can find it. The portal itself been designed by a government department with graphic design abilities that Captain Blackadder would describe as akin to “Ten colour blind hedgehogs. In a bag.” It is about as inspiring as a week old caesar salad and is marginally less intuitive. It takes so long to complete the endless forms that if you started one today, by the time you get to the end of it Scotland will be independent and Greece will be using the Drachma.

Then there is the restrictions that it imposes. Plans and documents cannot be more than 5MB in size, so larger reports need to be split into several parcels and some poor administrator the other end has to rebuild them like some kind of mind numbing jigsaw puzzle. In this world of fibre optic internet connections why is it that the planning portal thinks local authority systems can cope only with the file sizes generated by A3 monochrome plans?

The most ridiculous thing of all however is that if you upload a plan to the portal you need to confirm that you have printed the plan out at its original size before sending it. So, the paperless application system requires me to print off a full size copy of a plan that I do not want. Very eco, Mr planning portal dude. Of course, by asking me that question, it also assumes that someone else will be printing the plans. Even more eco friendly.

So to the fees. Just to get the nationalist point out first, the statutory fees that the portal generates for applications in Wales are just plain wrong. It is as though it has applied an exchange rate to the English Pound. Perhaps it knows something about independence for Wales that I don’t.

In terms of actually making payments, we were told at one training session for the portal that all we needed to do was to put credit card details into the website and bingo, all done. The planning portal dude was slightly taken aback when we pointed out that not a single person in the company had a limit that could support the £50,000 application fee for our next submission.

No problem he said, just post a cheque…. Sounds simple? One would think so, but it is no easy task getting the cheque reconciled with the online application. That isn’t surprising given that some authorities tell me that they get applications where the cheque never appears at all. Yes, somewhere out there there are people submitting applications on the Planning Portal as a joke. Oh, how they must chuckle…..

The final moan of the day is what happens with my electronic submission the other end. It is like the planning portal dudes were told to create a webpage, not a system for processing planning applications.

The whole raison d’etre of submitting on-line is that it is faster and you don’t need to chop down a forest the size of Wales (forests are measured in multiples thereof) to get an application registered.

The reality is however that some local authorities seem to want all that paper. I have no idea why. Perhaps they need the paper to fire up their wood stove heating. Maybe they need to prop up damaged furniture and there are not enough brick samples in the office to do the job. For whatever reason, I have yet to submit a major application without someone calling up for ten additional hard copies – and sounding very indignant when I protest.

In most cases I am told that it is because certain consultees apparently don’t have the facilities to read the electronic copies already submitted. With few exceptions, that’s just laziness in my view. The planning system has moved into the new century (just about) and consultees ought to catch up. I was told by the planning portal dude to refuse to supply hard copies to authorities that request them. Great idea but triggering the wrath of the parish council isn’t usually a good idea.

So why do I use it if I detest it so much? Aside from the very marginal environmental benefits, that is? Perhaps there is some slightly perverse pleasure in knowing that the submissions are often greeted the other end by exclamations of “Oh hell it’s another one of those electronic applications”.

More likely its because whether one likes it or not, e-submissions are the way of the future. Only by showing the boffins that it being used and is here to stay can we drag them up to the plate and force them to deliver us a modern system that achieves those original objectives.

PPW5 – It’s all about the jobs… at last!

November 7th, 2012

It is a rather rare event in this blog that I dish out praise to the Welsh Government. (WG). That is not because I have any particular axe to grind with the current administration. It is simply that WG has, to my mind, been painfully slow in responding to the economic crisis that has hit Wales as hard, if not harder, than other nations of the UK. It has, in my view, jumped blindly on the sustainability bandwagon without considering properly or fully the implications of so doing on the effects of investment and development. It has also failed to respond positively and speedily to the culture that has emerged in many parts of the Welsh planning system that process is more important that delivery. It has presided over a ballooning of the administrative burden placed on applicants and local planning authorities.

It has of course consulted on many of these issues. It has however failed to act quickly and decisively on those consultations. Moreover, it has in considering these consultations, appeared to draw too often upon the views of a small clique of WG friendly professionals at the periphery of day to day planning without full and proper regard to the views of those at the coal face the Welsh planning system.
The effect of all of this has, in my view, been to leave Wales standing while England has taken positive steps to encourage new jobs and investment. Today is different. Today, WG has at last acknowledged within the new Chapter 7 of Planning Policy Wales that jobs and investment are equally as important as social and environmental issues; and that occasionally, jobs may need to take precedence over social and environmental considerations.

It has also recognised the blindingly obvious point that a job is a job, regardless of whether it is within a warehouse, a shop, an office, a leisure centre, a factory or a theatre. The implications of this change in policy should not be underestimated.
Local planning authorities can no longer hide behind decade old employment allocations to prevent redevelopment for other job creating uses.
Imposition of the significant burdens that the sustainability standards in Wales place on new buildings may now be balanced against the job creating benefits that a less sustainable building can bring. While there are some local planning authorities in Wales that I am sure will respond positively to this change in direction, there will be others who will I am sure try and argue that it is ‘business as usual’. LDP and appeal Inspectors will, I am sure, give such dogmatism short shrift.
So, well done WG. There is hope for you yet.

Planner bashing – It’s a game anyone can play!

October 11th, 2012

The planning profession is once again up in arms as the Prime Minister is accused of joining the ranks of senior politicians both in Westminster and in the devolved nations having a dig at planners. I say ‘the profession’, it appears to be mainly those professionals working in local authorities who are the most irked, which is hardly surprising since it is they towards whom most of the criticism has been levied.
The responses to Mr Cameron’s comments are predictable. “Planners only apply the policies that central government create” shouts one officer. “Give us the funds and we will give a better service” wails another. In many ways, both have a point.

In terms of policy, all we have had from central and devolved government (of whichever persuasion) has been changing policy. Worse, policy has developed almost schizophrenic tendencies. We are told that planners should both support new sustainable economic development that is inconsistent with the development plan and to resist development that is premature to an emerging plan. We are told that green belts are both sacrosanct and that they are fair game. We are reminded that affordable housing is essential, but given clear signals that it should be relaxed to allow development to go ahead. We are told that retail is an employment activity but that loss of employment land to such uses should be avoided. I guarantee that if you can find a statement of policy somewhere in the grey and largely meaningless dirge of national planning policy, you will certainly find another somewhere else (either in the same document or in one of the very many documents that the Government failed to rescind) that says the opposite.

Trimming of budgets is a fact of life in this climate, but if development is one of the ways to kick us out of recession, then shouldn´t an efficient planning system be something worth funding properly? I was told recently that every new house that is built generates the equivalent of a job for one person for a year. Investment in a new and motivated planning officer would perhaps be far more efficient and effective investment than these awful and pitiful grants and funds that Government is obsessed with that seem to cost more to administer than they actually deliver.

From my comments you would be forgiven for thinking that I am entirely on all fours with my local authority colleagues on this planner bashing issue. Let me say right now, I´m not. There are, in my view, far too many bureaucratic dinosaurs in planning departments who are more interested in process than delivery – luddites who seem not to realise that the world out there has changed and see development as inherently a bad thing.

There are still some grumpy old trolls hiding in the darkest recesses of local plans offices across the nation who truly believe that, one day, manufacturing will come back to Britain with a vengeance and that consequently they should hang onto that fifty acre B2 site they allocated thirty years ago, just in case. Such people should be put out to pasture. However, let´s not tar all local authority planners with the same brush. There are still some out there that want to make a positive difference. Perhaps if Government stopped fiddling with policy after each breath and paid for some fresh blood in planning departments, the system may just be allowed to work in the manner that it was intended.

Feeling needy, Mr Pickles?

August 29th, 2012

When PPS4 was issued in 2009 one of its key purposes was to abolish the requirement for applicants to demonstrate a ‘need’ for new retail floorspace.

The abolition of this test was in response to criticism in the Barker Report that singled the need test out as a blunt and dysfunctional tool that, as the Government acknowledged, all too often causes planners to get caught up in debate about technical definitions, and overlook the vital question of what the proposed development actually means for the town centre and the people who rely on it.

Three years on, and PPS4 has been superseded by the NPPF that makes absolutely no reference to a requirement for applicants to demonstrate a ‘need’ for new proposals.

Yet, in a number of recent retail appeal decisions the need test gained as much consideration as the sequential test and impact. So are Inspectors and retail planning boffins ignoring the guidance and giving life support to a hypothetical and pretty meaningless test that ought to have been lain to rest three years ago? It certainly seems so on the face of it.

So why has the need test continued to appear in retail planning cases? The first reason appears to be that PPS4 was drafted so badly that need appeared, albeit obliquely, as one of the strands (16.1.d) of the impact test.

It referred to impact “..taking account of current and future consumer expenditure capacity in the catchment area up to five years from the time the application is made…”

If it were limited to this reference alone, then one would have expected the need test to be confined to a few lines at the end of the impact chapter in current retail assessments and appeal decisions.

What appears to have occurred however is that in seeking to provide ‘Practice Guidance’ on PPS4, Sir Humphrey has opted to insert the need test liberally and randomly throughout the document.

For example, at Paragraph 5.7 in the context of the sequential test it refers to the prospect of opportunities coming forward “likely to be capable of meeting the same requirements as the application is intended to meet.” Sounds like a need test to me.

At Paragraph 6.33 in the context of the sequential test it is somewhat more explicit:

“While there is no policy requirement to demonstrate need, an operator claiming that it is able to be flexible about its chosen business model would be expected to demonstrated (sic) why a smaller store or stores could not meet a similar need.”

Sir Humphrey has done well with this one. In the same sentence he has claimed there to be no ­policy requirement for a need test at the same time as insisting that one would be necessary to support a new retail proposal.

He has also managed to sneak the dreaded need word into Paragraphs 7.34-7.36 in the context of assessing the appropriate scale of new proposals.

Indeed, the only reference in the Practice Guidance that appears to be properly reflective of the actual Guidance itself is hidden away in the appendices at Paragraph D12, which suggests that turnover ought to be considered:

“in light of of quantitative capacity and other qualitative need considerations.”

As I have noted, the NPPF has superseded PPS4 and is completely silent on need.

This has however proven no obstacle to Sir Humphrey. Immediately following publication of the NPPF his flunkies at DCLG asserted that the Practice Guidance is still a material consideration in the determination of retail planning applications.

The NPPF and the Practice Guidance make for unlikely bedfellows. What we have is on one hand a national policy framework in England built on principles of simplicity and supporting development and on the other an ‘adopted’ Practice Guidance that continues to advocate a test that contributes towards a confused, dysfunctional and perhaps even anti-development approach towards new retail.

The result is confusion, with neither practitioners nor local authorities understanding fully whether to consider, and what weight to place upon, a demonstration of need.

One would have hoped that the egregious, plain speaking Mr Pickles would have stepped in and addressed this inconsistency. Perhaps he hasn’t seen the need.

Unaffordable housing

July 11th, 2012

What is affordable housing?

To some, it is “key worker” housing, providing homes for the nurses, doctors, teachers and other hard working public employees who play their part in the community and contribute to the richness of the fabric of that community. To others, it is something entirely different – it is “social housing” to accommodate those on benefits who have no desire to work at all, who who cause trouble for those self respecting residents of adjoining properties and streets. Whatever it is, it has become part of the lexicon of planners across the Principality and elsewhere. Housing needs assessments paint a picture of perpetual doom as increasing numbers of our population are deemed not to be able to afford to get onto the property ladder.

Whether one agrees with the principle that market forces ought to be interfered with in this way is neither here nor there – politicians of all flavours seem to agree that making homes affordable is one of the big issues of our day. The big question is however, what makes homes unaffordable? Going back to simple A level economics, the price of housing is a product of supply and demand. If the housing supply is somehow restricted and the demand stays the same, house prices will rise. This works in practice, too. New towns such as Milton Keynes have understood this concept and have for years regulated the release of new housing to match demand, to smooth out sharp rises or falls in house prices.

Stage one of making housing more affordable ought therefore to be to increase the general supply of open market housing. This is easier said than done. Despite ministerial pleadings, some authorities in Wales seem totally unable to recognise the need to flex and adapt positively to changing market conditions. These, it would appear, prefer to see no new houses being built than to depart from their local plan allocations, however dated and pie in the sky those allocations may now seem. Setting aside the fact that every new home built employs the equivalent of one person for a full year, by their inaction, these antediluvian authorities are guilty of constraining housing supply, forcing up prices and making housing in their areas less affordable.

Of course, even if local planning authorities were to approve every housing application ever submitted, the market would not provide a perfect balance of demand and supply. While in theory the average house price would match the average income, the reality is that in some areas, particularly cities such as London, housing supply is physically limited and demand is so high that even middle income earners find it difficult to buy onto the property ladder. This is a market failure that government, rightly in my view, ought to apply itself to. The current government thinking in this regard is straightforward – force developers to provide a proportion of their housing at below market rates i.e. make it more affordable.

In pure economic terms the effect of this is inescapable. When supply is constrained, market prices go up, and properties – to buy or rent – become even more unaffordable. Of course if affordable requirements are set at reasonable levels and if the local plan dinosaurs that exist in some local authorities are kept at bay, the effect on supply ought not to be too marked within the normal ups and downs of the housing market. However, what happens when the level of affordable housing requirement is set at higher levels? We have recent experience of a rural authority that has a policy of demanding that 60% of new housing in its principal town must be affordable . Westminster, one of the most expensive areas of the country, tops out at 50% affordable housing requirement, and only then for large scale non-central developments. Why does a rural local planning authority insist on a level higher than one in the very centre of our nation’s capital?

There is no doubt that there is a local need for more affordable housing and that developers ought to take a share of the responsibility of meeting this need. However, when 6 out of 10 new homes are required to be affordable, the balance of responsibility is clearly leaning the wrong way. So what on earth has prompted this particular authority to pick a policy from the lower branches of the la la tree? There are two schools of thought. The first is that housing development is so lucrative that developers can “easily afford” to subsidise affordable housing to this ridiculous level. The fact of the matter is, however, and as the statistics are starting to show, they are patently wrong.

This leads into the second school of thought – that, despite the clear direction of national policy that the presumption ought to be in favour of new development, the authority just doesn’t want to see it happen. If we really want housing to be affordable, then the solution appears to be much more than grabbing opportunities to raise the affordable housing obligation at every opportunity. It is about pragmatism – Reflecting sensibly on dated housing allocations, listening to and responding positively to market demands and setting realistic affordable housing levels.

The housing market is dynamic and if we are to make housing affordable for all, it is time that in some local authorities the officers showed a bit of dynamism, too.

Planning delivery – winds of change or just hot air?

June 1st, 2012

It was the RTPI annual planning conference in Cardiff this week, which I have to say was one of the best such events I have attended for some time. Well done to Roisin Wilmott for organizing it.

I will admit that part of my enthusiasm is in part down to the rather nice (recyclable) bags we received on arrival and the particularly good stock of competitor consultancies’ pens, pencils and post it notes that I was able to acquire.

However, what really made it for me is that, for the first time in years, the conference seemed to grapple head on the issues that really matter out there in the development world. If previous conferences had been friendly lightweight bouts, this one was more akin to cage fighting.

The theme of the event was delivery. The underlying message from start to finish was that the Welsh Government and certain local authorities need to start focusing on the outcomes of the planning process, not the process itself. The day was full of examples where the process has failed both the economy and the environment and no one could have been left in any doubt that change is required.

Against that backdrop one would reasonably have thought that there is a wind of change blowing through the planning offices of the Principality. Yet immediately after the conference I spoke with a colleague (who did not attend) regarding the frustration he had with getting a simple change of use application registered.

Picture the scene. An existing, vacant shop unit within a local centre is proposed to be changed to a quality restaurant. The existing building is largely fit for purpose and so the only need for interaction with the planning system is to change the use class from A1 to A3, with no built works at all. Simple? Apparently not.

Firstly, a design and access statement was demanded, despite there being no built works required or proposed. How does one explain the design of something that hasn’t been designed? This is however a WG requirement of the recent Development Procedure Order and the local authority had no ability to waive the requirement. As such, time and money was wasted preparing a document we didn’t want to write and the planning department was likely not to read.

Secondly, the local authority insisted upon internal layout plans of the proposed restaurant, despite internal arrangements falling outside the scope of planning control. The reason was apparently to calculate car parking requirements yet there was no policy or SPG basis for the request.

At the conference this week there was a compelling presentation by Dr Calvin Jones of Cardiff Business school highlighting the global oil crisis that sits just around the corner and the need, amongst many other things, for clear measures to reduce our dependency on car use. Yet, still, the welsh planning system still includes an effective presumption in favour of meeting the demands of motorists. Conceptually, this is just plain wrong, particularly in locations (such as this) where there is genuine accessibility by many other modes of transport.

My colleague’s argument against providing an internal layout plan was not however that the principle of providing parking was plain wrong (even though it is!). There was a genuine practical difficulty in that, as is common in cases such as this, the client had not and would not prepare any such plans until the change of use planning permission was secured and the premises acquired.

In such circumstances the pragmatic approach would have been to apply an approximate net to gross ratio, as is commonly done for food store schemes. Such an approximation would be eminently reasonable since internal arrangements would in any event fall ordinarily outside the scope of planning and so any plans supplied could not reasonably be expected to be anything other than illustrative.

Once again, however, the system (in this case the local planning authority) showed no pragmatism at all and insisted on costly, meaningless and unenforceable plans being supplied.

Thirdly, despite the application being for a change of use only and despite the fact that it would need to be the subject of a separate application in any event, the local authority asked for details of extraction plant locations. While the detail of the plant was not known to the client for reasons explained already, general locations could be assumed and my colleague was happy to indicate these to the local authority.

What then happened however was the bureaucratic icing on the cake – the local authority demanded a design and access statement to consider the plant that we were not actually applying for. The absurdity was there for all to see. My colleague was being asked to explain the design philosophy for plant of which there were no details; and to demonstrate how the client had made the area of roof upon which the plant would be sited accessible to the less mobile. Forgive me, but having to provide a document explaining how people can travel to the roof plant by public transport is not just absurd, it is plain stupid.

This example typifies the difficulties with planning at the moment in Wales. The process is standing in the way of the delivery. In this case, delivery of the economic benefits of new jobs and investment and the environmental benefits of bringing into beneficial reuse a vacant building in an eminently sustainable location.

The conference discussed delivery in terms of environmental issues standing in the way of economic development, yet in truth planning has always been about balancing these two issues. What stands in the way, and what gives planning a bad name in the development community, is the process by which the balancing is undertaken.

Regrettably, pragmatism and proportionality in far too many cases still do not exist in the Welsh Government and local authority lexicon. The creation of local lists and application checklists were intended to bring clarity to the system and to ensure fully informed decisions, but have instead in cases such as illustrated above provide sustenance to the ‘computer says no’ attitude that still exists in some parts of the public sector, to the detriment of both the economy and the environment.

Attendees at the RTPI conference received that message loud and clear. I live in hope that the message is taken back to the town halls across Wales and brings about the culture change we need desperately.

As one of the, excellent, conference speakers rightly put it, consulting and talking about improving the planning system is good, but delivery is what it is all about.