Planning is all about compromises. It nigh on impossible for any scheme to be fully compliant with every policy: a presumption against height might limit the amount of affordable homes that can be provided; accepting a taller building might mean that the garden of a neighbouring house is overshadowed at certain times of the day.
The purpose of planning is to determine which of these criteria has the most importance – one person’s right to enjoy their garden might be diminished, but the lives of future occupants of the flats next door could be greatly enhanced. It’s the job of the planning system to distil these competing objectives into a binary outcome.
Often the responsibility for making such a call falls on the planning case officer, whose job it is to compare the application against the local, regional and national planning policies and decide whether it should be approved or refused. In particularly contentious cases—where there are a large number of objectors, for example, or for a large development—the decision will often be made by a planning committee consisting of elected politicians, many of whom discharge their responsibilities with diligence and care. Often, though, smaller applications are left to be determined by officers without the appropriate experience and confidence to reach a considered and reasonable conclusion.
The issue of balancing competing demands can be particularly challenging when considering applications for housing on smaller developments. Because of their size, such schemes are often handed over to more junior officers. They also tend to be more complex, often close to existing homes and squeezing the most out of fiddly sites. An aggrieved neighbour might be particularly vocal about losing an extra hour of sunlight on their prized carrots, or simply dislike the idea of an open plot of land they’ve looked across for years being occupied by a new home. How is a local authority officer supposed to determine which of the multitude of competing policies takes precedence? And how can they turn this information into a single binary decision?
I was intrigued by an article in The Economist newspaper (and an accompanying methodology) which described a system for weighing up competing priorities in a fair and transparent manner. A set of questions is presented, with a single pool of points that can be assigned to a positive or negative response to each. As each preference is made, the pool depletes; but expressing a stronger opinion for each challenge reduces the remaining points by a square factor. So, if you have a mild concern about the potential impact on neighbouring amenity of a new development, you can use a single point to express this. If you have a significant concern a second vote will cost you not two points, but four—two squared. Expressing a major concern would then diminish the available points by a further seven (16 less the nine you’ve already spent), and so on. You continue until there are no points remaining or it’s not possible to assign them to any further questions. Allocating no points to one question simply means that the assessor believes there the policy implication is neutral.
Using a standard set of topics which planning officers usually assess an application against it’s possible to construct a series of positive and negative questions against which an application is assessed. This allows the different aspects of a scheme to be weighed up against one another: a less-than-substantial harm to a conservation area might be mitigated by an outstanding design, for example.
The following application is a crude example of how such a system might work.