The Future of Planning in London - Localisation or Centralisation?

With the capital still very much the engine room of the economy, we felt it is time to take stock of what this brave new planning world could look like for London. In this article Patrick Reedman, Dan Blake and Holly Benwell of DHA’s London office scope out where things might be going in the context of the LURB.

 

The age-old question; localisation or centralisation?

 

‘In their current form, National Development Management Policies could supersede both the London Plan and local plans. If the reforms remain aimed at shifting the power between these planning policies; the Committee believes that it should shift in favour of localising this power rather centralising.’

 

Just a couple of weeks ago, the London Assembly announced its concern about the potential impacts of the LURB (which is currently at the House of Lords Committee stage) in its Future of Planning in London report. Needless to say, there are some things in the LURB which the London Assembly (and probably more so, the Mayor) do not like about it.

 

It all comes back to the age-old question of how much should planning be centralised, and how much should be local?

 

It is generally fair to say that the London Plan and its associated guidance sets higher technical standards for development than most of the country. We mean this in terms of requirements for things like achieving net-zero, affordable housing, setting accessibility standards and requiring inclusive design, making sure people have got nice high(ish) ceilings, access to outside space, and making sure there is parking for tricycles. It is probably also true to say that a lot of policies conceived by the Mayor’s Forward Planners often eventually find their way into LPAs’ local plans and guidance beyond the Capital in some form or another. In this sense, the Mayor considers himself at the vanguard of (normally, but not always) sensible design policies which are there to make Londoners’ lives more tolerable lives.

 

The ability to prepare and implement these detailed standards is available to the Mayor because of the way the Town Planning system currently works – the Mayor retains control of strategic policy and decision making in the Capital and all of the 32 London boroughs must apply the Mayor’s policies in the London Plan… like it or not (quite often, not!).

 

So, the proposals in the LURB for National Development Management Policies (‘NDMPs’), and the proposals to make changes to the GLA Act 1999, come as a direct threat to the Mayor’s status as policy maker. It’s been a point picked up in the Lords that the introduction of NDMPs will add another dimension in the inevitable tussle between the national (central government), strategic (the Mayor) and the local (the Boroughs) when it comes to plan making and decision taking, by potentially giving central government far reaching powers for policy making.

 

This, to us, is going to be the next key battleground between the Mayor and Whitehall, whatever the final drafting is on the ‘primacy’ of the NDMPs.

So, what are these proposed NDMPs?

 

To contextualise, it is proposed in the LURB that NDMPs would be general development control policies decided by the Secretary of State and which would have statutory status for decision taking. The proposed wording of the LURB from the Commons says that all decisions will have to be made in accordance with the NDMPs and any conflict between policies resolved in favour of NDMPs. As such, NDMPs could have primacy over local plan and London Plan policies, which would be required to be consistent with - in substance - and to not repeat anything. This is intended to make the content of local plans faster to produce and would also have the effect of giving Whitehall greater control over (presumably) any detail it wished to have control over.

 

Whilst we agree that NDMPs could have some role in streamlining development control policy creation in most areas (9 out of 10 District and Borough local plans say roughly the same thing in the ‘development control’ policies section, don’t they?), we also agree with the London Assembly that NDMPs (and the proposed changes to the GLA Act) could have far-reaching, maybe even ill-considered effects – specifically in the capital.

 

Clearly in certain regions NDMPs will result in improvements in areas such as environmental performance, but in London, these policies will likely result in a decline in outcomes by undermining the potential of the London Plan to set ambitious and innovative policy approaches and, in turn, the wider effects (regionally / nationally) that this could have on design standards elsewhere. The worry of the London Assembly is that detailed national policies would end up being, well, just ‘average’, and could well be pretty unambitious given that they are intended to apply everywhere. The reasonable concern is that they would undermine the quality of development in the Capital as a result.

 

So where might this go from here? With the LURB picking up momentum again, it seems likely that we will have NDMPs in one form or another (assuming the LURB makes it over the line), and the House of Lords appears to be questioning whether the NDMPs should really have primacy. The key battles, whatever the precise wording of the LURB will be, are going to be about what the scope and content of these NDMPs is.

 

No doubt, if and when the LURB gets assent and the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities sets about drafting the NDMPs, it will have to tread very carefully given their proposed statutory status, the amount of interest there will be from the Boroughs and the Mayor (pulling from both sides in terms of the amount of regulation that they would like in planning) and the development industry more widely. Each policy announcement is bound to have ‘judicial review’ written all over it; from those corners who want to retain and impose more control as well as those who take the opposite view.

 

For more information, please contact our London team, who would also be delighted to assist with development proposals in the capital and further afield.