In her first speech as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves stated that Labour promised to grasp the nettle of planning reform, seeing the planning system as “antiquated” and “as a graveyard of economic ambition”.
The speech clearly outlined the new government’s stated mission to “kickstart economic growth” with the planning system as part of this. She flagged several planning policy changes, some of which were made immediately and others promised to be delivered very shortly.
Highlights were:
- A return to centralised housing targets to “get Britain building again”. She confirmed that Labour planned to build 1.5 million homes in England over the course of the parliament, which is a re-iteration of a manifesto promise. This breaks down to 300,000 new homes per year over a 5 year parliamentary term. The 300,000 new homes is the previous government’s assessment of actual housing need, but clearly this is a bare minimum. When previously in power, the Labour government centrally promoted Regional Spatial Strategies which outlined regional housing targets, but these were famously ‘abolished’ by Eric Pickles when the Coalition government came to power in 2010 in favour of planning decisions being made locally. The NPPF will be revised to address centralised targets, with consultation on this beforehand. We anticipate the creation of targets will not be an easy ask, given the significant work which was required to advance the Regional Spatial Strategies.
- Green Belt boundaries will be reviewed to prioritise brownfield and grey belt land. There are well known sensitivities regarding the erosion of the green belt, with protection of the ‘green belt’ being a highly emotive issue in local politics; which is likely why the ‘prioritisation’ of brownfield and grey belt land is mentioned. However, her statement does not exclude “greenfield sites” from the review which local communities often fight hard to protect.
- The lifting of the “wind farm ban”. This resulted in the immediate disapplication of footnotes of the NPPF which constrained onshore wind farm development in England. This moves decisions on wind farm development from being a local to a national issue. There is good reason for this, as the installed capacity of onshore wind being largely unmoved since 2017, with Germany and France jumping significant ahead comparatively on onshore wind deployment. We have covered the lifting of the ban in greater detail in this article here: Lifting of Ban on Onshore Wind Farms in England | DWF (dwfgroup.com)
- An additional 300 planning officers will be recruited to speed up the planning process. This has been touted as far back as the Labour party conference in 2023. Resource in Local Planning Authorities are seriously stretched at the moment, particularly in areas of the country particularly hit by the cost of living crisis. This has in part led to long planning application determination times and slow local plan preparation. However, 300 additional planning officers will be less than one for each of the 330 Local Planning Authorities. This will need to be increased significantly to have a material impact on reducing pressure on resource.
Clearly the new government has sought to hit the ground running on planning reform, with this speech coming only 72 hours after the result of the election was known. However, many governments have started their terms with bold intentions of reforming the planning system, but have often hit the same problems of balancing local issues, national need, land supply, LPA resourcing, development funding and viability.
