The Coventry Society recently published an article about what is happening to Planning. To say that it’s in a mess, might be putting it too mildly. You might recall that the Society held a meeting and published a response to the Government White Paper back in October 2020. The Government has decided not even to respond to the thousands of comments made by societies like ourselves. Instead, they have published a further consultation on revisions to the National Planning Policy Framework (affectionately known as the NPPF).
For those of us who follow the development of our city, the influence of the NPPF is very significant. This document, sets out the Government policy on planning. It sets out the presumptions and “rules” that are used to decide planning applications and the requirements of local plans.
The consultation document is a very technical and difficult document and responses had to be via an online portal, answering the 58 questions set. So, it’s not easy to simplify our response, but suffice it to say that there are parts of the document we fully support and others that we don’t.
There are a number of good things about the new proposals:
- We have welcomed the stated desire “to make good design and placemaking that reflects community preferences a key objective of the planning system”.
- We welcome the additional flexibility in relation to meeting housing supply requirements.
- We welcome the call to make buildings more beautiful. We note however the subjective nature of beauty.
- We welcome the additional flexibilities in relation to the release of Green Belt land. However, this flexibility is removed by the required uplift – see below.
There are also some things that we feel are more negative:
- The revisions do not adequately address the Climate Emergency. We need to rebuild the planning system to be at the forefront of addressing climate change.
- The proposals to encourage developers to build as quickly as possible the houses that they have permission for are not implementable and weak. More needs to be done to force developers to release land or develop it.
- The document states that housing requirements for individual local authority areas are no longer targets. It also removes the “Duty to Co-operate” between adjoining local authorities. We believe that housing targets should be set for sub regional housing market areas.
- We can see value in the proposed National Development Management Policies, but we believe that these should be optional rather than deterministic.
Perhaps the most damaging part of the document, though, is the requirement that the 20 largest cities should continue to be required to provide 35% more housing than they would otherwise have had to. This arbitrary and unfair requirement affects Coventry and we have joined forces with civic societies from other members of the 20 to write a joint letter to Michael Gove, setting out our concerns about this. We have shared this letter with the three Coventry MPs as continuation of the 35% Uplift will put enormous pressure on the local authority to release more Greenbelt and Greenfield sites in Coventry’s current local plan review.
You can read the Government’s consultation document here. You can download the Society’s response here.