The planning system is a curious thing. On one hand, it’s a highly technocratic enterprise. Impenetrable reports, documents and surveys are interrogated by under-resourced and overworked planning officers with the solemn responsibility for weighing up thousands of pages of jargon against vague and frequently antediluvian policy.
On the other, there’s ‘planning by vibes’ – the approach adopted by those with limited interest or understanding of how the planning system works or what it’s actually for; those who navigate their way through this complex landscape by intuition and blind faith. Planning by vibes rejects procedure, policy and convention and instead defers to personal preference and peer pressure.
Planning committees tend to fall into one of these categories. While there are thousands of dedicated and knowledgeable councillors up and down the country who discharge their duties with gravity and grace, there are far too many who see their role as the last line of resistance against rapacious developers determined to lay waste to local character.
Since last year’s general election, there has been a flurry of policy announcements as the new government attempts to make good on its ambitious promise to build 1.5 million homes before the end of this parliament. A revision to the National Planning Policy Framework was published quickly in July and formally just before Christmas.Accompanying this announcement was a declaration of war on troublesome planning committees via a new Planning and Infrastructure Bill due out in the coming weeks.
Transparency in decision-making and, more critically, in the consequences of those verdicts, is a key part of the proposals. The consultation paper describes several examples of where refusals contrary to officers’ advice have cost taxpayers vast sums of money – and that’s leaving aside the emotional and economic burden of a nationwide shortage of homes. Were opponents of development aware of the financial impact of erroneous decisions, they might not be quite so keen to delegate their responsibilities to the Planning Inspectorate. Anything we can do to shine a light on this profligacy should be welcomed.
Mandatory training for planning committees seems like an obvious improvement. One wonders why individuals in positions of such influence shouldn’t already possess a rudimentary understanding of the nature of their responsibilities, and this will only impact those elected members who have not taken the time to acquaint themselves with the Town & Country Planning Act or, at the very least, the local policy they’re supposed to be assessing applications against.
Reforms to the mechanism through which officers decide some planning decisions (‘schemes of delegation’) are also long overdue. Currently, the number of objections an application receives (and the system is almost always tilted toward objection) determines whether it gets decided by the case officer or at planning committee. This threshold can be as little as just two or three.
Elevating this number significantly might help. Thousands of angry letters might raise eyebrows and get a mention in the local press, but when considered as a percentage of the total population of a district, these rarely translate into an overwhelming mandate for refusal.
There’s no limit on geography either, and anyone who has submitted an application in recent years will be familiar with objections submitted by those many kilometres – or even continents – away. Letters of support should have equal weight to those in opposition, too. In most cases, they don’t. Those in favour of building new homes need to be heard as clearly as those who are not.
Opponents of centralised planning reform will doubtless consider these suggestions as an affront to democracy, but they are nothing of the sort. There are few other areas of decision-making that are subject to local referendums with such nebulous protocols. The number of objections received in response to a planning application is no indication of its quality; nor, for that matter, compliance with policy. Once an application comes before a planning committee its fate should already have been decided and the decision should be a matter of procedure rather than determination.
This is why the government wants to return more power to officers to decide applications that already comply with the local plan or are on sites allocated for development within the local plan. Nobody is helped by a system which is often little more than a roll of the dice.
This isn’t to diminish the agency that communities should enjoy in setting the parameters for new development, be that housing, railways or solar farms. It is right that housing targets – as those for all infrastructure – are set at national level. Where they go and, to a degree, what they look like should indeed be in the hands of local people. But the time to engage with this is during the plan-making process, not every time an individual application comes forward.
Perhaps an understanding of the basics of planning should not be limited to just those sitting on committees, but form part of the national curriculum too. That way we might finally call time on ‘planning by vibes’ and instead focus our efforts on delivering the homes and infrastructure the country so desperately needs.
This article was published in the Architects’ Journal on 9 January 2025.