How the planning system lost its legitimacy, and how to regain it

This chapter details the mess of the current planning system and suggests how planning can win back a degree of legitimacy. Planning has become a battleground. The system almost ensures that participants take unreasonable positions. Conservationists and local people take up opposition almost in principle because they have no confidence in what will emerge from the process. On the other side, developers use their legal and financial power to intimidate weak local authorities who are desperate to meet housing targets to get what they want. If the public is losing belief in planning, the solution is not to depoliticise it by making it more responsive to market signals or putting ‘experts’ in charge. Part of the solution is to engage more people and get their buy-in. Neighbourhood planning is a good way of doing this. However, the planning system must also show that it can deliver.

How to think about housing and planning

This chapter discusses how politicians have been deceived by faith-based, ideologically predetermined anti-planning arguments from free-market think tanks such as Policy Exchange. While ministers were fixating on the planning system as a barrier to house building, they neglected to do the obvious thing: build houses. In time, the ‘war on planning’, a steady stream of reports supported by seminars, newspaper articles, and private lunches and dinners, began to have an impact. Planning came to be widely blamed for the country's failure to build enough homes and, more generally, for holding back economic development. The chapter then looks at four related issues that help explain why a new approach is needed: the rise and fall of council housing; the economic model of the big developers; the rise and fall of the ‘property-owning democracy’; and land values.

Solutions

This chapter presents theoretical solutions and new policy proposals for the housing crisis. Local authorities should be allowed to borrow to build and the government should increase its funding for housing associations. Rural areas, in particular, need social housing that is affordable in perpetuity. Stable or gently falling house prices should also be an aim of policy. The government should consult on a range of potential changes to taxation. Moreover, local authorities in theory have the power to turn down poor-quality developments; the government and the Planning Inspectorate should encourage them to use it. Other solutions include planning for greenfield development, strategic planning, and new civic house building.

The housing crisis

This chapter examines the scale of the housing crisis: too few homes; too many living in intolerable housing conditions; and growing and ultimately unsustainable inequality between those who own property and those who do not. Poor housing harms lives. The high cost of home ownership means that the sort of people who would have been buying their first home a generation ago are now stuck in insecure, rented accommodation. They may have good income, but they lack wealth. Addressing these problems requires targeted public investment and stronger regulation. To suggest that all that is needed is more house building is to miss the point. However, part of the solution must be to address the chronic undersupply of new homes. This is a moral imperative, for conservationists as much as for anyone else.

Afterword

This afterword argues that if ministers really want to get houses built, they have the power to make it happen. However, obsessing about numbers alone is a bad mistake. The country will not get the new houses it needs by privileging numbers over everything else. Indeed, another argument in this book is that the countryside matters. As well as a housing crisis, the country has a host of related rural and environmental woes. The country needs to think hard about the location of new homes and build them in ways that foster nature and help address climate change. A serious push to ensure that all new homes are zero carbon and energy efficient will have significant social, economic, and environmental benefits.

Why it matters where we build: environmental constraints

This chapter addresses those who doubt the value of landscapes or the importance of the Green Belt. The Green Belt is the best-known and most popular planning policy, but it is often misunderstood. To give confidence that it is worthwhile improving the Green Belt, people must believe in its permanence. If everyone assumes that it is only a matter of time until development consent is given, no one will invest in its enhancement. It would also be easier to debate the role of the Green Belt if Green Belt policy was respected. Currently, the Green Belt is more respected in politicians' speeches than in reality: when it comes to building in it, ministers look the other way.

Rural housing

This chapter explores good and bad examples of house building in rural areas, what makes people oppose development and what might persuade them to support it. For all the concerns about imposition and inappropriate development, there is a strong case for more rural housing—much more in some places. The trouble is that there is generally zero confidence that a new development can result in better places. Indeed, the common and justified assumption is that development causes harm; that promises of affordable housing, good design, and green infrastructure will be negotiated away on grounds of non-viability; and that local people will be lied to and forced to accept whatever the developer can get away with. It is not always like this, but it almost always seems like this to local people faced with development—development that is always framed as meeting housing numbers, rather than creating a better place.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE). CPRE's 43 country branches and 100-odd district groups aim to direct development to places where it will harm the countryside least and benefit it most. This was also the aim of the men and women who founded CPRE. They were remarkably open to the idea of change in the countryside provided that it was properly planned and provided that sophisticated and high-minded people like them helped guide it. As well as opposing inappropriate development, conservationists should propose how to do developments better and where they should go. The aim should be both less damage to the countryside and more new houses. But to make this possible, policymakers must recognise that the current system needs radical change, both to improve the affordability of housing and to make it possible for groups like CPRE to engage more constructively.