Christmas came early for many YIMBYs as a new draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) was released on Tuesday. The NPPF is the key planning document that sets out the national government’s overarching goals for where and what types of new development should and should not be allowed.
There are two big positive changes out of the announcement: building near stations, especially those in the green belt, and sustainable development within built up areas. Pro-housing campaigners are right to celebrate these victories.
However I worry that we risk limiting the best improvements while at the same time certain policy tightenings, specifically around transport, heritage, and flooding, mean that the NPPF changes are ultimately two steps forward, one and a half steps back. If the green belt stations and development within towns policies are watered down after the consultation, and the bad policies kept as they are, the overall changes will look more like a regression than progress towards 1.5 million homes.
Green belt stations
Building around green belt stations is a good idea. For historical quirks, many stations in the UK are on the outskirts of a town or village. When the railways were first constructed it was cheaper and easier to build alongside a town rather than face the disruption of going through it. But due to our planning system and the green belt, towns often haven’t been able to wrap around their station. So one side of the tracks is homes and the other is fields.
In a paper on new towns that I co-wrote when I worked at Britain Remade with Create Streets, we proposed building out these ‘mirror towns’, that is, building at a similar compact scale to existing developments on the other side of the tracks.
The new NPPF will make it easier to build around these stations by explicitly stating homes built within walking distance of stations are not inappropriate in the Green Belt.1 The potential for this is great. One Centre for Cities study suggested that building nearby certain stations could result in two million homes while using just 1.8% of the green belt.
However there is one significant word of caution here, and it’s nestled in policy GB7 h. iv. that requires new development to:
“Not prejudice any proposals for long-term comprehensive development in the same location”
A lot of green belt local councils are well experienced in finding ways to block development and they know that their current voters tend not to want new homes near them. This clause provides some wiggle room for the council. If they were to cynically develop long-term plans for development around their stations, then they can justifiably reject any developments in the short-term.
Of course these long-term developments may not ever happen as the local council will rely ultimately on a future Conservative or Reform government rolling back the changes in the NPPF around building on the green belt. And even if a future government keeps this, new homes will be built at a much slower rate than some of the excitable commentary makes out, since councils and housebuilders will both have a vested interest in this being a slow and steady drip feeding of supply rather than a short burst of homes.
Another challenge holding back these worthwhile developments are the ‘golden rules’ that require up to 50% of the development to be affordable (i.e. subsidised) housing. High affordability requirements function as a tax on new development. In this case it means that only half of the homes can be sold at the going rate. The costs for building the subsidised homes don’t go away, instead they are borne by the market rate homes. The higher the affordable requirement, the fewer market rate homes bear the rising costs. In a lot of circumstances this makes building unviable.
Normally there’s an option to do a viability check if the headline affordability rate is too high, but this option is removed for green belt developments. This means that development will only go ahead in the most expensive areas where house prices are high enough to subsidise the additional affordable homes. That means no building around green belt stations except in a few South East green belts.
At the same time these market rate houses are also expected to fund infrastructure improvements and additional green spaces. Most green belt sites could probably fund one of these three priorities, but it will be relatively rare for the uplift from building to be large enough to fund 50% subsidised housing, infrastructure upgrades, and additional green spaces.
The end result of these green belt tweaks is that more homes will be built nearby stations. That will especially be the case in council areas that have out of date local plans and don’t fully realise how they could block potential schemes. However the scale of this is limited by the longer term development proposals that councils can draw up to block development, the artificially high affordability requirements, and the ultimate fact that should there be a right wing government after the next general election, most of these tweaks will likely be washed away. That gives developers only a few years to plan schemes, get planning approval (which will often only be after winning an appeal), and then actually get building.
If the Government wants any chance of this being a durable reform that survives a future right wing government, or even a Liberal Democrat coalition that Labour might need after the next election, they need to encourage good quality design. Building traditionally beautiful homes around the stations in well laid out streets may serve to convince voters that their concerns around new homes were overblown. I’d like to see stronger language in the NPPF borrowing from Create Streets’s excellent work and planning guidance on design including traditional materials rather than risk an unnecessary backlash from ugly designs.
Sustainable development
The other massively positive change is the approach to new developments within already built up areas. The Government has chosen to upgrade the presumption in favour of sustainable development to apply across all developed areas. That means that developments will be approved unless their benefits are likely to be substantially outweighed by adverse effects. That’s a big change that will strengthen the hand developers have against recalcitrant objectors.
This could be transformational for brownfield land with significant new development within built up areas. Even if a council rejects an appropriate development perhaps because of NIMBY resistance, developers will be able to win planning permission through appeal.
As Sam Dumitriu put it, this is a maximalist, “crush the NIMBYs” policy. Hopefully the Government keeps it in, but I worry that they may back down given previous concessions over the Planning and Infrastructure Bill when they faced controversy.
Now for the drawbacks
The new NPPF tightens policies in a lot of areas, including flooding, heritage, and transport. This will require additional surveys and paperwork plus give objectors new ways to oppose development.
The problem with flooding is the starting point being rejection rather than a balance where the benefits of new development are taken into account. The NPPF will outright reject certain developments within flood zones even if they could prove wider sustainability benefits, safety for its anticipated lifetime and reducing overall flooding risk. It also retains the sequential test which uses significant paperwork to prove that there are no hypothetical better sites out there even if the current site and design would be acceptable.2
Heritage protections are another challenge. The draft tightens the language around harm to non-designated heritage assets where rejection beckons unless the developer can argue that the benefits outweigh the harm. For any new development that impacts designated heritage assets, extra weight is given to preservation, which means more surveys. Both of these mean more surveys. Each of these is also partially reliant on subjective decisions in a grey area, which gives more ammuntion to the opponents of development.
The transport section is much the same. There are two concerns here that stick out. These are the requirement for local authorities to set maximum standards for car parking and the encouragement to limit the need to travel and avoid ‘unsustainable’ development, which in practice means restricting car-based homes.
Instead of letting builders decide how many car parking spaces would best suit their new buyer’s needs, local authorities will set requirements that restrict options. While that may make sense in zone 2 London, this has the potential to be a massive detriment to development in a lot of the country where cars are the only way of getting around. A flat or small home built in a rural area without a designated car space is simply much less likely to sell, which means builders will be much less likely to build those homes in the first place.
Trying to restrict car-based development cuts against the way most people live in Britain. Car journeys make up around 80% of trips by distance travelled. Trying to design new homes across the country like central London won’t work and the NPPF needs to be honest that most people prefer to drive at least some of the time. This could even harm the excellent green belt policies, since while people may take the train to work, they will need a car in their local area, particularly if they have a family.
Restricting car use runs the risk of restricting some of the most common types of development in the UK. This is even more concerning considering the increasing uptake of electric vehicles and the Government’s continued commitment to the 2030 internal combustion engine ban will make the sustainability arguments ring hollow.
Two steps forward, one and a half steps back
The draft NPPF is a clear improvement if it makes it through the consultation process unamended. The green belt stations and sustainable development policies will lead to more homes built - even if they are unlikely to solve our 6.5 million home shortage. Unfortunately the Government has left in caveats that mean these policies will not be able to live up to their full potential and not yet thought through the politics. More worryingly still is the tightening of policies around heritage, flooding, and transport that have the potential to restrict common types of development seen today. After the consultation if the former good policies are watered down and the bad policies kept or even strengthened, there’s a real risk that the NPPF turns out to be net-negative towards housebuilding.
Planners love a double negative
What a dreary place you would build: people living in badly-planned housing, bound to their cars for access to almost everything they need, from jobs to hospitals to shopping. Countryside all covered in tatty new houses, towns' and cities' brownfield sites and civilised streets both left to decay under the suburban onslaught. Perhaps it would breed seemingly independent, small-minded, Tory voters; but it would make their land as well as their society irredemeably ugly. JM