‘Radical change is coming – we’ve got to work to get the best change we can’

The first time Victoria Hills saw the major changes proposed in the government’s planning reform was last Wednesday, just hours before their publication. The chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute wishes she had seen the suggestions earlier – indeed, she would have liked someone from the 25,000-strong planning profession to have had a hand in drafting them. Nonetheless, she is now mobilising the profession to play its part in the overhaul. Prime minister Boris Johnson has hailed the planning white paper as the most “radical reform, unlike anything we have seen since the Second World War”, complete with zoning, a new developer levy and new digital local plans. Hills and the RTPI will be lobbying for funding to ensure that planners remain at the heart of that reform. She tells EG that the body isn’t averse to changing the decades-old system but will be fighting for local authority inclusion, strategic cross-boundary planning and sustainable development. Were you involved ahead of the white paper publication? We haven’t been involved in detail to date, and I would very much like to have been. I would like to have seen a planner on the commission. There is a slight worry that this has all come about in a “Number 10 bubble”. This is a really big change, and they are going to need the planning profession. The sorts of changes that are on the table here are not going to happen overnight, and there are a lot of questions. They will need to work hand-in-hand with the planning profession. What the government has said is that they want radical change. It’s no good saying “we don’t want that” – it is coming. We’ve got to work to get the best change that we can. What concerns do you have, and what is the focus for RTPI? The big question marks for us are: how is it going to accelerate progress to net zero? How is it going to deliver affordable homes? How will it promote sustainable transport with strategic planning? The lack of reference to any strategic planning is one of the biggest omissions. It seems to be plans for government and then local authorities – where’s the bit in the middle? People don’t generally just live and work in one place, they travel across the border, so you need to have more strategic planning, for homes and infrastructure. There are some wins in here for us. They have recognised that chief planning officers should become a statutory function within local authorities. Then you have somebody at the top table to join the dots, but also make the case for resourcing. How will this overhaul be funded? The consultation document says “we will consider how best to resource this later in the year”. What we are saying is – that’s not good enough, later in the year. We’re in a pandemic now. Local authorities are at the coal face of responding to that pandemic. If you want to keep construction on the road and start building for green recovery then we need resourcing and planning now. We are not averse to having a conversation on reform, but let’s resource it right now. If they are expecting to load all of that on developers then how is that going to speed things up? For some areas of most profit that may work, but how does that sit with levelling up? It’s unclear to me. What are the challenges in introducing zoning? Putting the whole of England’s land into three categories is possibly a little over-simplistic. Local authorities will have to decide the growth, renewal and protect areas, and that will take a conversation with the community. At the moment we have a discretionary system, which means they engage with the local plan and then also later down the line when an application comes forward. That means flexibility, which means you can change with the times. I don’t think that’s red tape; it’s really important for local communities to have that opportunity. The zonal system, on the face of it, takes away that discretion – when it’s locked in, that’s it. This is a big change. There are a few question marks for local democracy. Will this new levy be an improvement on the current system? No one would say that CIL or section 106 is perfect. But it is able to deliver community infrastructure and affordable housing. The devil will be in the detail as to whether one levy will be able to deliver the affordable housing. Our red line is that this has got to be locally set. What’s good in one area won’t be good for another area. How do we safeguard against the inability to level up, and how do we incentivise that elsewhere? Is the commitment to affordable housing ambitious enough? The government has made bold announcements on funding for affordable homes, but it seems to be missing here. I think most people would accept that we need to deliver more affordable housing. This pandemic has brought to the fore the inequalities that exist within our country, and now is the time to get behind this. We need to do a lot better than just keep providing what we already are. But this is difficult – just merging it into a levy doesn’t make it easy. Should local authorities be taking on debt to deliver affordable housing? If local authorities are going to increase their borrowing capacity, the thing that they should be focusing borrowing on is more affordable homes. Should they be increasing their borrowing to forward-fund infrastructure on behalf of applicants to pay later? It’s a question. That would be quite a change. The affordable housing crisis needs many solutions, but local authorities taking a longer-term role in that would be a good thing, and social housing has got to be the priority within that. What happens next? We will be holding roundtables with our members across the nine regions, which the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has said they would like to come along to. Then we will set out, really clearly, some helpful suggestions to answer these questions – and there are a lot of questions. To send feedback, e-mail emma.rosser@egi.co.uk or tweet @EmmaARosser or @estatesgazette Photo © Royal Town Planning Institute