Local plan changes are core to North West housing ambitions

While changes to the planning system and NPPF are a cornerstone of the Labour government’s attempts to kick-start the economy, arguably even more important are the forthcoming changes to local plan making, writes Mat Evans of Gladman.

Later this year, we are expecting to see further regulations and guidance to fast-track local plans, with the government’s intention that new local plans are adopted within 30 months. This is no mean feat.

The plan-making picture across Cheshire and Lancashire is mixed at best with torturous routes to adoption for some local plans. The current Cheshire East Local Plan took eight years from the start of work to its adoption in 2017, with a housing requirement of just over 1,000 houses a year. This goes up to 2,508 houses a year when using the new standard method. While this time, in theory, the examination won’t be the subject of Objectively Assessed Need wars, the task at hand for the council within the time stipulated is enormous.

The story is similar across the region. With housing requirements up almost universally and timelines for preparation compressing, most authorities will be faced with a need to reduce the average timelines for previous plan preparation from more than six years down to 30 months. Achieving this with a back-drop of severe financial and capacity pressure across the public sector will not be easy.

Let’s be clear: this is something that really matters. Gladman achieves 75% of its consents locally. The majority of these sites are allocations, both draft and adopted. Plan-making is vital to the government’s aim of delivering 1.5m new homes in this parliament – aren’t targets fun? Without active plan-making across the country, we quite simply will not hit this target. We won’t provide the homes that are so badly needed and we won’t deliver the social and economic benefits that come with new homes in an area. Perhaps most importantly, we won’t provide the boost to UK GDP that the government requires to invest in the wider reform and modernisation of public services. Planning policy is the cornerstone of many of our collective aspirations for the country.

There is help there though. The 30-month time-frame promises to bring with it a reduced evidential burden on local plans, which is long overdue. Local plan examinations now consist of so many documents that even the Library of Congress would need to add more shelves to accommodate them. Proportionate evidence is vital to allow local plans to be produced in a timely and cost-effective manner – but can we get there, and more importantly can we get there quickly enough?

More resourcing for local planning authorities will help, and the government is committed to further cash injections to increase the number of planners working in local government.

Digital transformation of mapping and other evidence-based documents will also undoubtedly help but again will take time to have an impact and require significant upfront investments in technology and capacity to get them off the ground.

To deliver the next wave of local plans it will be vital that planning, and in particular planning policy functions, are given their deserved status of importance in LPAs.

Since austerity began, these functions have often been seen as easy targets for savings, resulting in entire team’s worth of knowledge and experience being lost in many instances. Rebuilding them has been a huge task, but they must now be at the centre of council thinking again. This is not only to meet the targets and aspirations of the government, but to drive local growth to leverage investment, growth, and receipts to support wider planning services.

Planning policy shouldn’t be in the shadows of development management. It’s a vital cog in the system and as a sector we should support and champion it whenever we can.

• Mat Evans is a senior strategic planning director at Gladman, with experience of attendance at Examinations in Public across the country and previous experience producing development plan documents in the public sector