A better planning system

In February 2010 I was responsible on behalf of my party for a series of radical proposals for the reform of the planning system under the title ‘Open Source Planning'. Open Source Planning provides the principles and the inspiration for the Coalition Government's planning reform programme and the Localism Bill. Without a radical reform of the planning system, our chances of getting the investment and growth we need will continue to be hampered and crippled.

This previous Government tried to deliver new housing by means of central and regional targets and by bullying local authorities. Instead it delivered the lowest numbers of houses since the 1920s. It left councils unable to clear their housing waiting lists. Its targets were a cruel deception to developers looking to manage their businesses, and such houses as were built were built without consideration for local people and local need.

Labour has always believed in central planning and ignoring local opinion. In 1946 when Lewis Silkin, the then planning Minister, visited Stevenage to tell them they would become a 'new town' his car tyres were let down and the railway station was renamed "Silkingrad". Not surprising really; with typical Labour arrogance he told his audience at the town hall that despite a majority of local residents being entirely against the new town "It is no good your jeering. The project will go forward because it must go forward." Labour never substantially changed its approach.

All this shows just how broken our planning system is. It is a charter for confrontation, has failed to support the economic well-being of the country, has contributed to the breakdown of our broken society and has been a recipe for delay and expense. What it has delivered are broken promises such as the previous Government's promise to protect the Green Belt; Green Belt which it then proposed to build on.

What is required, as we have proposed, is a fundamental and long overdue rebalancing of power, away from the centre and back into the hands of local people. Whole layers of bureaucracy, delay and micro-management will disappear as planning shifts away from being an issue principally for "insiders" to one where communities take the lead in shaping their own surroundings.

In essence, what lies at the heart of this is not an issue about planning but about human nature. For the previous Government, local people were, to paraphrase philosopher, Thomas Hobbes,  nasty, brutish, NIMBY and selfish. As such, it believed they could not be trusted to play a responsible part in how their communities developed which it believed should be left to ‘experts' and ‘those in the know.'

We simply do not believe this. We believe that local residents must be made part of the solution rather than part of the problem and that this is best done by giving them a real say in the future of their communities with the appropriate incentives to match.

A top-down, target-led approach has comprehensively failed to meet Britain's housing needs. We have ended up with a crisis in the number of new houses being built and we have also ended up with a crisis of affordability with younger and poorer people priced out of the market. The failure of the target-led system is compellingly illustrated by the fact that the building of new social housing halved under the previous Government.

Work by Shelter shows that the lack of affordable housing is having a huge impact on every part of our lives and especially on family life. The grim picture it paints of Britain today is not just about the availability of bricks and mortar or the availability of a mortgage. It is an intimate part of the social problems we face in Broken Britain.

What this means for the Henley constituency is discussed elsewhere.

Our first challenge, therefore, is to deliver enough of the homes people want, in the places people want them, in order to meet Britain's unmet housing need. The first thrust of reform has to be to move to a more sustainable housing and planning system that uses radical new freedoms and powerful incentives to enable communities to deliver the new housing we want and need.

Under our localised planning system, we will expect local authorities to assess the local need for affordable housing (and the need for all housing), using robust and established methodologies, and build the results of their assessment into their local and neighbourhood plans. We, therefore, anticipate that local and neighbourhood plans will make provision for the development of affordable housing, by including in plans the requirement that a proportion of housing built in an area or site is affordable.

Instead of centralised compulsion, we will use incentives to ensure that both local people and developers have a strong financial interest in delivering new affordable housing. All affordable housing units delivered will qualify for an enhanced version of our council tax incentive scheme - the New Homes Bonus. Every new affordable housing unit that is built will earn a grant calculated at more than 100% of the council tax raised by that unit, annually for a period of six years. This will encourage councils and local residents to promote the development of affordable housing (by means of their local plan).

We are confident that these substantial financial incentives and the introduction of Local Housing Trusts to allow local community-led development, the majority of which we anticipate will want to build some homes for social rent, will deliver substantial amounts of affordable housing where it is needed.

Conservative councils are already leading the way on this. Shelter's own research of those councils which are delivering affordable housing shows that 7 out of the top 10 performers are Conservative controlled.

It is now time to rebalance the planning system so that it confidently walks the path between democracy and localism and the promotion of sustainable development.

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