We need a serious dialogue about planning  – Inside track

Labour wants to build lots of new homes, modernise the country’s creaking infrastructure and decarbonise power. It sees an ambitious building programme as fundamental to tackling the UK’s low investment, low productivity, low growth economy and generating the wealth a Labour government will need to implement its wider programme. And to achieve things, it wants to reform planning.    

The party is right that the planning system has become too slow and bureaucratic. It is more often viewed as a battlefield between opposing interests than a way to improve the country. Few who engage with it are left feeling happy either with the outcome or the process (though it pays a lot of lawyers’ bills).

Promises to free up planning are worrying
But it is easier to diagnose the broad problem than come up with effective solutions. As Clausewitz almost said, everything in planning is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. When I hear Rachel Reeves call the planning system “the single greatest obstacle to our economic success” or Keir Starmer promise to put a bulldozer through it, I think of 2010, when David Cameron described local authority planners as the “enemies of enterprise” and George Osborne mused wistfully on how quickly development is agreed in China. 

Inspired by reports from developer funded think tanks, which made it sound easy, the Conservatives embarked on 14 years of planning reform. They liberalised, streamlined and simplified the system, while running down local authority planning departments both rhetorically and in their funding. Their reforms failed but in this election they propose more of the same, one more heave: “We can only achieve our infrastructure ambitions if we continue to simplify the planning system to make it easier to build, faster.”  

Will Labour, if elected, do better? On housing, the manifesto provides some welcome detail, as did Angela Rayner’s speech in May. For 20 years, ministers of all parties have too often bought the line that, if planning is weakened, the market will provide. The tone of Labour’s manifesto is different. It is about planning positively for the new housing that is needed, with welcome outline proposals on compulsory purchase and site assembly, land value capture, cross boundary strategic planning, brownfield development, design and sustainability, new towns and urban extensions, and social housing.  

Labour says it is “committed to preserving the green belt”. Its plans to develop “lower quality ‘grey belt’ land” within the green belt are worrying, but it is right to propose a more strategic approach to land release: at present, a higher proportion of green belt land is lost to development than non-green belt land and homes in the green belt are built at an average density of only 14 dwellings per hectare. The green belt is not best defended by maintaining the status quo. 

There will continue to be battles over new homes in the countryside, but almost everyone now recognises the severity of the housing crisis and no one thinks all the homes we need can be built on brownfield land. Labour’s tone suggests that it understands the problem of poor quality, badly sited development. It promises to respect nutrient neutrality and create “places that increase climate resilience and promote nature recovery”.  

Labour’s manifesto is light on infrastructure planning detail
For years now, we have had a war of attrition between developers and campaigners over plans for poor quality, poorly serviced, low density housing on random greenfield sites. Labour is surely right to think we can do better.   

On planning for new energy and infrastructure, however, its manifesto is lighter on detail. Everyone knows that we need to speed up the consenting of major infrastructure projects if we are to achieve power decarbonisation by 2035, let alone 2030. But too many people are proposing simple fixes to complex problems. As the planning lawyer Catherine Howard says, “we are seeing… a mixture of ideas that are either too radical to be implementable, or too trivial to make any (positive) difference”. She argues that we need not just political will, but “a smarter, deeper, more forensic legal analysis of the problems and how to solve them”. 

I would add two things. First, as the Winser Review sets out, we need much more than speedier planning if we are to decarbonise energy (or, indeed, build the other infrastructure the country needs). Planning gets much of the attention, presumably because, in the fact of all evidence, politicians think planning reform is easy. But if we had a perfect planning regime, whatever that is (not, I would suggest, the Chinese system), we would still be left with a serious skills shortage, supply chain difficulties and all the other things holding up development. 

Second, if it wants to get building, a Labour government would be sensible to engage seriously with civil society, particularly nature and landscape NGOs with millions of members. It is not a question of whether we decarbonise. We must, and nature campaigners know the devastation climate change is already inflicting on nature. But there are legitimate concerns about the impact some energy proposals will have on nature.   

As set out in an earlier blog, any conflicts between climate action and nature restoration can be overcome with a serious dialogue. Both are necessary and, indeed, legally mandated. But simply trying to force proposals through will end in tears. If the frame becomes ‘nature or development’, no one should be surprised if nature campaigners defend nature. The government should also show that it takes seriously the impact of new energy infrastructure on much loved landscapes.  

Labour’s proposals on housing suggest that the party understands that planning liberalisation has failed. They return to the Labour tradition of seeing planning as the way, in Lewis Silkin’s words the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, “to secure a proper balance between the competing demands for land, so that all the land of the country is used in the best interests of the whole people”. I hope that spirit will also inform a Labour government’s plans for energy and infrastructure.