Planning - the difference a year makes

In what's beginning to feel like standard practice, this December we are once again waiting for a government announcement on important changes to the planning system in England. Just before Christmas in December 2022, the previous government published a consultation on reforms to national planning policy pursuant to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill. Last December, again just days before Christmas, they published the revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) alongside a Written Ministerial Statement setting out the next stage in their Long Term Plan for Housing. And this year we are told to expect the new government's response to their July 2024 consultation Proposed reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework and other changes to the planning system very soon. Change and uncertainty has been a theme in planning for several years now. Will this continue?

All change?

At first glance, practitioners could be forgiven for thinking that change has become the status quo. Not only did the new government quickly revert the name of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities back to the "Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government" (MHCLG), they wasted no time in proposing their own reforms to the planning system.

The July 2024 consultation aims to undo the revisions to the NPPF of the previous year (on which see our Briefing Note). An important change is reinstating the requirement to calculate housing need using the standard method as well as changing the method itself. The previous Secretary of State, Michael Gove, is reported to have acknowledged that his changes to housing number calculations sent "the wrong 'message' to councils." The new government is receiving push-back on its proposed reforms from local authorities – the BBC has reported claims that the new housing targets are "unrealistic" and "impossible to achieve". How the government responds to this should soon become clear.

The government plans to meet its target of delivering 1.5 million homes over this Parliament through both the development of New Towns across the country and a radical change in approach towards Green Belt development. It is proposing a mechanism for Green Belt release, a new "grey belt" designation and "golden rules" for building on the Green Belt. However, this is still against a background of "brownfield first" – in September 2024, MHCLG invited views on proposals for a form of brownfield passport which would identify development that should be acceptable on brownfield sites.

Other revisions include removing references to "beauty" throughout the NPPF, returning instead to a focus on well-designed development. This is welcome for many reasons as we outlined here and here when references to "beauty" were first introduced. However, the disbanding of the Office for Place by the government last month should not be mistaken for downgrading the importance of good design in development. Instead, departmental savings following the 2024 Autumn Budget required that the responsibility for good design and placemaking be brought back into MHCLG. Matthew Pennycook has confirmed that the government "retain[s] the objective of creating high-quality, beautiful, and sustainable buildings and places" and "will update the National Design Guide and National Model Design Code in Spring next year."

Other changes are more subtle. There seems to be a new approach to developers, recognising that slow build-out is the result of problems with the planning system rather than the cause, with the government launching the New Homes Accelerator Programme in August 2024 to help progress stalled schemes. Also, rather than calling out local authorities for poor performance (such as through the May 2024 dashboard of planning performance data), there seems to be a greater emphasis on helping them to improve, whether by increasing resources through new planning fees or by changing the way that committees operate (in the awaited Planning and Infrastructure Bill) or meet (as per the recently published consultation on remote and hybrid attendance and proxy voting).

What has stayed the same?

Despite changing the approach towards planning reform, the new government does appear to be trying to bring some much needed stability to the system.

Angela Rayner has so far held off tinkering with the many new permitted development (PD) rights introduced by recent Secretaries of State. In particular, she has declined to row back on the controversial Class MA PD right permitting change of use from the wide Class E (commercial) use to Class C3 (residential) use, which were further expanded earlier this year. Whilst these rights can bring benefits, in their recent report the House of Lords cross-party Built Environment Committee reiterated concerns about the ability of PD rights to “cut across any attempt at joined-up thinking” and recommended that the government should review the policy.

There are also no proposals to change the previous government's mandatory biodiversity net gain (BNG) regime, which is taking time to bed in for town and country planning development after its introduction in February this year. The new government has announced that it will proceed with the requirement for nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs) from November 2025, although with less than a year to go and as yet no draft secondary regulations or guidance in place, we hope that the delays encountered when BNG was introduced for town and country planning development won't be repeated for NSIPs.

The new government is also continuing to work to find solutions to issues such as nutrient neutrality, with the Planning and Infrastructure Bill due to provide "necessary legal underpinning" to ensure that development "can fund nature recovery where both are stalled." The Housing Minister has indicated that the government will carry on working towards ensuring that water scarcity does not prevent development in areas such as Cambridge, although it is not clear yet whether they will implement the previous administration's proposal for a water credits system.

We have also been told that the government will continue with the previous administration's plans to further slim down the NPPF by introducing National Development Management Policies (NDMPs) alongside the new system for local plan making, both of which were introduced by the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 (LURA). They are also proposing to progress the LURA's changes to compulsory purchase compensation. What is less clear is what will happen with the LURA's proposals for Environmental Outcomes Reports, which were pushed back to 2025 by the previous government. It's worth mentioning the new administration's decision to abandon the Infrastructure Levy which was also due to be introduced under the LURA – whilst this might look like a break from the previous government's approach, it seemed as though the new levy was unlikely to be implemented in any event.

What next

The course of the next year will become clearer once the government has published its response to the July 2024 NPPF consultation. We may then hear more about when the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will be published, and when we will see draft legislation, policy and guidance relating to the unimplemented elements of the LURA. In the meantime, we can but hope that the inevitable upheavals from implementing these changes will lead to a period of stability and success with achieving the government's goals.

Come back tomorrow for Day 6 of the 2024 Yule Blog, when we will open the door for a look back on CCUS and offshore wind developments this year.

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