Government PD plans are imperfect but important

Many are sceptical over whether the government’s proposals to extend new permitted development rights will offer any real benefit to the high street. Critics have condemned PD, saying it puts quality and affordability at risk. But the proposals could be an important step away from an “unpredictable” system, says Nicholas Boys Smith of Create Streets. Plato’s allegory of the cave described a group of prisoners so sequestrated from the rest of the world that they mistake shadows passing on the walls for reality. It sometimes feels as if the debate on planning is also stuck in a cave. Sadly, many of the responses to the government’s imperfect but important proposals on PD show why. As our recent report More Good Homes sets out, the UK has a very strange planning governance and process. This matters. The right to develop in the UK has been nationalised, with huge uncertainty of what will be permissible. In much of the world, the right to develop is merely regulated, very often with much greater clarity about what is permissible. We rely more on development control, less on rules. The primary permission that is needed is a planning permission, unlike the rest of Europe (other than Ireland) where a building permit is required. Put differently, we run a bespoke system with discretionary decision-making for a mass product. We allocate for individual sites on a case-by-case basis rather than zoning more widely for what is, and is not, permissible. We have less clarity, more discussion and fewer rights to develop land or build new homes. Local Plans are policy documents, not regulatory documents. They influence but don’t control what can be built and viability tests can, and are, used to ignore them. There are advantages to such a strangely bespoke system. It’s better at handling complexity and large sites. However, it is much worse at dealing with small sites or with permitting the gentle and popular intensification of our streets. The uncertainty of what a Local Plan will permit leads to avoidably high levels of public mistrust in what will be built. It also matters because the slow process and reduced clarity increases planning risk. This poses a major barrier to entry for smaller developers, self-builders, build-to-rent providers, and third sector developers. It is not an accident that the UK has a consistently and increasingly more concentrated development sector. In Britain about 10% of homes are built by self or custom-build – the European average is 50%. Here, 34% of the construction market is smaller firms; in Germany, it’s 50% and in Denmark 73%. If we’re to build enough homes, we need to move from an unpredictable system ‘bespoke’ in all circumstances to one of more predictability for most smaller developments. This categorically should not mean a ‘free-for-all’ or ‘bonfire-of-the-regulations’ (choose your cliché). But it should mean for modest developments a locally-set and provably popular clear set of rules (on form, height, materials, fenestration, for example) within which development is possible. The quid pro quo is that if people break the rules, sanctions should be harsh. This is why the government’s proposals on extending permitted development could be (but aren’t yet) an important step in the right direction. The danger, if proposals are too Treasury-driven, is that they will include no quality controls and lead to the stark degradation of streets and squares up and down the land. If that happens, they’ll be unpopular and will be repealed. If, however, they are accompanied by clear and simple mechanisms for local councils to set provably locally popular form-based codes, adapted for different street types, then we could at last be moving back to the more sensible way we used to regulate the built environment and much of the rest of the world still does. It’s time to get out of the cave. Nicholas Boys Smith is the founding director of Create Streets