Paul Finch, Programme Director and co-founder of the World Architecture Festival (WAF), has offered his thoughts on the UK\u2019s planning system and its history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Paul Finch writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Any account of the UK planning system and its endless changes, dictated by politics, the economy or fashion, make it sound rather like a war. The analogies come thick and fast: the planning system is the battlefield in which operations are conducted. One side wants to build stuff and make money, or fulfil some social purpose like providing sports stadiums. The other, at least since the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act, wishes to control these aspirations, substituting the profit motive with a notion of social value deriving from a command economy model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rival ideologies resulted in the wrecking of towns and cities across post-1945 UK, as shopping centre developers and planning regimes fought out one battle after another, sometimes joining forces to impose a fatally flawed notion of modernity on fuddy-duddy medieval town centres. Planning had become almost a dirty word by 1969, when the famous doctrine of \u2018Non-Plan\u2019 hit the headlines in the pages of New Society, where planning radical Peter Hall, iconic architect Cedric Price, critic Reyner Banham, and the magazine\u2019s Paul Barker suggested that, given what had happened since 1947, it might be time to try something else \u2013 like organic growth, rather than development control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Architecture\u2019 became an even dirtier word following the attack on by the then Prince of Wales in his 1984 speech at Hampton Court, attacking modernists and all their works. \u2018Community architecture\u2019, and indeed \u2018community planning\u2019 became all the rage; endless consultations would inevitably, or so it was said, produce improved environments and greater social cohesion. Unfortunately, these aspirations were undermined by the abandonment of planned public housing, and a rapid rise in uncontrolled inward migration, making housing shortages even worse than they might have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Various riots, huge increases in house prices as starts and completions declined, and a growing sense that social cohesions had ended at about the same time as the planning system had been introduced, resulted in a \u2018something must be done\u2019 response from politicians oblivious to their own role in creating scepticism about the \u2018planning system\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, and quite unfairly, the system became the object of attack. It was not politicians scrapping public housing (while in denial about population increase) who were to blame for the housing shortage but planning system. But how to fix it? The answer came in the 2012 National Planning Policy Treaty (sorry Framework) \u2013 produced to hold the line between development desire and rational planning for the 21st century. It was simultaneously a top-down imposition of principles and processes, to which all other plans would need to conform, and an all-embracing defensive wall, holding together the disparate elements of the planning system in a way which would simultaneously satisfy development, heritage, community etc etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alas, the NPPF should now be seen as the Maginot Line of the planning world: no sooner had it been built than people were finding ways round it, in particular the niche new breed of planning consultants who became the SAS, or possibly SOE, in the great planning battles that have amused or infuriated us in recent decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those 1947 ideas about local authority responsibility had been by-passed almost Day 1 by policies which assumed that localism wasn\u2019t up to doing anything positive at a big scale: hence the introduction of new town corporations, and later various development corporations which assumed growth would be blocked or slowed by that 1947 system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later, in the spirit of Non-Plan, enterprise zones and freeports became the preferred method of bypassing planning, even as regionalists like John Prescott promoted the idea that the wider the area, the better the planning \u2013 whether the public liked it or not. The referendum on regional assemblies knocked all this on the head, but the idea of ever-widening zones of planning influence never went away, and indeed in the minds of EU strategy planners, included the elimination of national states in favour of new map-lines devised by themselves. The UK would be part of the Atlantic Seaboard along with Portugal (as these entities would cease to be known).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the meantime, back on the local battlefield, it started to become apparent that far from being the answer to all problems, the NPPF was itself a problem. Hence endless revisions, tinkering and modifying, providing endless complications for planning barristers to feast on at public inquiries, where undefined concepts such as \u2018beauty\u2019 or \u2018grey belt\u2019 — the no-man\u2019s land of the system — helped bring the entire planning process into further disrepute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mad inquiries, conducted at vast expense to little public benefit, have become the order of the day. The War Ministry (sorry, Ministry for Housing, Community & Local Government), sends out new instructions on a frequent if irregular basis. Often these appear to be aimed at stopping housebuilding altogether. What was once regarded as a social good is now treated as a social evil. So in order to build you may have to pay for planning advice (a recent invention), Community Infrastructure Levy (a recent invention), Section 106 planning gain benefits, 35 per cent of a development as \u2018affordable\u2019 housing, and undertake the arduous process of actually obtaining a planning permission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile SMEs in the housing sector have gone to the wall, not helped by planning rules which seem to benefit the diminishing n umber of big boy housebuilders who can afford planning consultants and planning lawyers, not to mention the finance costs of log public inquiries which drive small companies out of the market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The planning inspectorate has become a form of war crimes tribunal, overseeing the completing claims of development and planning irrespective of why the crimes took place in the first place, or what the outcome will be of decisions one way or the other. Spatial planning is now required to include matters properly the province of Building Regulations because they involve numbers and science, for example carbon analysis or biodiversity. Obscurantist arguments about \u2018viability\u2019 bring more misery to the system \u2013 in reality cut-and-paste lies told by consultants (another new niche) acting for either side in what should be a mutually agreed technical exercise. It is all about war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Th first victim, as in any war, is truth. Sadiq Khan\u2019s lies about housing starts in London, a strategy initiated by former Camden councillor James Murray who, despite no credentials for the job, is now Chief Secretary to the Treasury. This does nothing for the reputation of a planning system where officers are frightened to express a professional opinion if it will jeopardise the relationship with their political masters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maps of London, showing housing developments with permission which cannot be started for various planning and financial reasons, look like the ones who see after a cluster-bomb attack. Yet according to the Starmer government, all is in hand to complete 1.5 million homes by the end of the war (sorry, first term in government!). The phrase \u2018new towns\u2019, which used to mean something significant, now means urban extensions. They won\u2019t produce significant numbers this decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For governments with no experience of how planning actually works, there is a profound reluctance to create a planning system based on certainty (\u2018If you do this you will get that\u2019). Everything is a negotiation. The armies of applicants and their architects, planning consultants, ecologies, landscape architects, lawyers, viability specialist and Uncle Tom Cobley commit themselves against the planning system\u2019s own battalions, many mirroring the opposition\u2019s. It all takes ages \u2013 Tantric planning that seems to go on forever, but with no guarantee of a happy ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The non-combatants, the general public, look on in amazement as the costs go up and up. The trouble is, in a war, nobody much likes the implications of\u2026 collaboration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n