Government’s new planning rule book: ‘it’s a developers’ charter’

CPRE has slammed the government’s revised planning rulebook, the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), as a “speculative developers’ charter”.
In a damning early critique, the organisation says the government has not fulfilled its promise to “build attractive and better-designed homes in areas where they are needed”.
Indeed, the document, published on Tuesday, July 24, continues to “favour the delivery of any development, rather than development that meets communities’ needs, respects the environment, and adheres to policies in the NPPF other than those which deal with housing delivery”.
CPRE’s main worry is the introduction, in November, of a ‘housing delivery test’, which sees councils further encouraged to set high housebuilding targets – the new policy has clearly been designed to enforce those targets.
The test will mean councils are penalised when housebuilders fail to deliver homes in their areas; the ‘punishment’ is the removal of local control over planning decisions.
This, of course, will leave countryside open to speculative development.

Other CPRE concerns include:

• a failure to provide an effective brownfield-first policy
• the continuing failure to support provision of affordable housing in rural areas
• the discouragement of neighbourhood planning because of uncertainty over the validity of Local Plans older than two years

Matt Thomson, CPRE’s head of planning, said: “Rather than delivering ‘what communities want’, as it claims to promise, the new planning rulebook and its new ‘housing delivery test’ will result in almost all Local Plans becoming out of date within two years.
“It is a speculative developers’ charter and will lead to the death of the plan-led system.

“Without a Local Plan, councils and communities have little control over the location and type of developments that take place. Local communities’ needs are ignored and valued countryside [is] destroyed for no good reason.”

Despite its disappointment with the revised NPPF, CPRE applauds some positive moves within it. They include:

• National Parks and AONBs reinstated as having the “highest status of protection”
• Maintenance of Green Belt protections and an improved definition of “exceptional circumstances” for releasing land from Green Belts
• Exclusion of National Parks, AONBs and Green Belts from the Entry Level Exceptions Sites policy
• “Social housing” reinstated in the definition of affordable housing

For more on CPRE’s response to the revised NPPF, see here