The Government has unveiled what is arguably the biggest set of reforms to the English planning system in decades. And yet, these measures are unlikely to enable the Government to meet its flagship housing target of building 1.5 million new homes in this Parliament.
Why? Because for all their laudable aspiration, the reforms still fall foul of the same inchoate mix of trepidation and temerity that has handicapped British housebuilding for half a century. Because there is political capital to be gained from both building and preventing homes, for most of this period, British housing policy has largely oscillated between the two opposing forces of political expediency and public expectation.
When the two meet, as they did after the Grenfell disaster when there was insurmountable public demand for political action, then there is room for optimism. But when these forces are in opposition, as was the case when the last Government’s sensible, Policy Exchange-recommended zonal planning reforms were pulverised in the aftershock of the landmark 2021 Chesham and Amersham by-election backlash, then the state recoils into the safety of its status quo shell and progress is sacrificed for survival.
For all the commendable planning reforms the Government is now proposing, the determination not to poke the sleeping sceptre of Chesham and Amersham, even in the midst of a housing crisis, still haunts and hobbles effective ministerial enterprise.
Many of the proposed reforms echo Policy Exchange’s own recommendations. Street Votes — the muzzled flagship proposal of our 2021 Stronger Suburbs paper — now finds itself partially reactivated in the Government’s commitment to allowing more upward extensions and greater plot densification.
Densification happily forms a large component of the proposals. Policy Exchange’s latest paper, S.M.A.R.T. Density: Building Dense, Building Beautiful, argues that intelligently increasing density is key to solving the housing crisis. The reforms respond by allowing increased density around strategic rail hubs, a policy also recommended in Policy Exchange’s 2024 paper, The UK’s Broken Housing Market.
Elsewhere there is welcome support for SMEs and a series of targeted exemptions from what many consider to be excessively punitive biodiversity regulations and certain design requirements in local plans that exceed national standards. All in all this is a dynamic and pragmatic collection of reforms deftly primed to accelerate activity in the housebuilding sector through densification, regulatory liberalisation and statutory simplification.
Why then is the Government still likely to fall short of its 1.5 million new homes target? There are several reasons. The first is the absence of any commitment to increase council housing. The Government has already made clear that its latest tranche of the Affordable Homes Programme will release funding for 180,000 new social housing units over the next ten years. But this falls well short of the 100,000 units per year many, including Policy Exchange, have called for.
The Government is inexplicably maintaining its strict ideological ambivalence towards beauty
Secondly, the Government is inexplicably maintaining its strict ideological ambivalence towards beauty. Significantly, the current reforms make no explicit reference to beauty or even high aesthetic quality as being a specific statutory ambition. This has the potential to prove particularly damaging to the proposed plans for massive greenbelt expansion and encircling English cities with necklaces of eyesores will harm the environment and inflame local opposition to development. The Government must learn – quickly – that beauty is a bridge and not a burden.
Which leads onto the final and deepest problem with the Government’s reform package, with most planning applications unaffected by the changes, it makes no attempt to fundamentally shift our planning system away from a discretionary model where developers apply for planning permission to a prescriptive model where developers comply with set rules. In short, it fails to do what the last Government tried to do until it was chastised at Chesham and Amersham. Yet this is a transition Policy Exchange has consistently called for, from the default planning permission awarded by compliance with our Placemaking Matrix (Better Places, 2023) to the pre-agreed permission format proposed in our Pre-missive Society paper (2024).
In theory, the discretionary system offers two key advantages, democratic oversight and quality control. But with secretaries of state able to overrule planning decisions at public inquiries and a modern urban landscape offering limited aesthetic delight, neither benefit is satisfactorily fulfilled. Unless the discretionary model is either reformed or replaced with one that provides greater speed and certainty, the potential for inefficiency and inconsistency that bedevils the current system will continue to frustrate housing supply.
But of course, it cannot be reformed or replaced without poking the bear of public disapproval. Using demand to impose sets of rules sounds harmless enough until local residents object, once again pitting political expediency on its familiar collision course with public expectation. Governments are well aware of this fragile civic truce which is why, in the main, they go to great lengths to avoid upsetting it and instead propose planning reforms that may well be ostensibly copious but will never quite be disruptive enough to wake the elephant slumbering in the corner of the room.
But this Government cannot afford to do that. It has made housing the central plank of its policy programme and knows full well from the defenestration of the Conservatives over immigration how savage voters can be when they catch the familiar scent of seismic electoral betrayal. Many see NIMBYism from residents as the root of Britain’s housing problems. They are wrong, it is the Not In Your Back Yard mentality from successive Governments that is to blame. This is the Great British Housing Disease and this Government is yet to overcome it.
