Densifying our inefficient suburbs has long been the holy grail for YIMBYs. For years, advocates have been arguing that the best places to build more homes are those where people want to live. This is key to a more prosperous future. Building dense, high-quality homes in cities like London, Cambridge and York will lead to lower emissions from less car travel and warmer homes and higher economic productivity from knowledge spillovers, in addition to a labour market where people can take up the jobs where they’re most needed.
Now, after years of YIMBYs championing this dream, the new Government seems poised to make it a reality and make it possible to build more homes and densify existing suburbs.
Labour recently trailed their new plan to densify cities: planning passports. Despite launching to little fanfare, planning passports could, if implemented correctly, be one of the most radical shakeups of the British planning system in decades. The Guardian reports a Labour source as saying, “Only by building denser cities can we drive growth and prosperity across the country, because denser cities mean people are closer to work, have better transport infrastructure, and business has the widest talent pool” – a quote straight from the YIMBY playbook.
Planning passports would work by allowing the fast-tracking of planning applications that meet a predetermined set of design and quality. The government’s working paper introducing planning passports states that whilst such passports would not grant automatic consent, they would “establish a very strong starting position which would carry significant weight in making decisions and create an expectation that compliant schemes are approved.” The effect of this would be that meddling NIMBYs could not intervene to prevent perfectly adequate housing, resulting in greater supply overall. Labour highlights the success of this approach by referencing “upzoning” policies used with great success in other countries to significantly grow their housing stock and improve housing affordability. If properly implemented, this could turbo-charge the UK’s housing growth.
In its current state, the British planning system often operates with a degree of subjectivity, where decision-making heavily relies on the will of local authorities. Though planning decisions are meant to be made with reference to the local plan, which in turn should conform to the National Planning Policy Framework, these documents are oftentimes contradictory and vague – if indeed they exist at all (York hasn’t had an up to date local plan since 1954).
This set of circumstances can allow room for local authorities’ political biases to dictate decisions and deny the housing that their communities desperately need despite a framework of established guidelines and regulations. And even if local authorities go against their local plan to deny a housing application, decisions can only be overturned by an expensive appeal – a path not every developer can take, especially small and medium-sized ones.
As such, many developers don’t bother to put forward many applications given the chance of failure, unless they have deep pockets and sense a particularly significant business opportunity. With such a cumbersome system, it’s little wonder that the proportion of new homes delivered by small and medium housebuilders has dropped from 39% percent in 1988 to 10% today.
The difficulty of shepherding new homes through the planning system is reflected by the UK’s continual failure to meet its housing targets. And as bad as the situation is on the national level, with the UK barely meeting 2/3rd of its overall target, this failure masks an even worse one in the areas of the country that need housing the most, particularly in London and the South East. Islington is an illustrative example – it’s only managed to deliver an average of 449 net housing additions over the past two years, barely half of its yearly Local Plan target. Clearly, the current system is not working.
Labour intends for planning passports to change all this by changing the default answer on brownfield land from a “no” to a “yes”, densifying British cities and, crucially, their suburbs..
And contrary to what some believe, there is plenty of room for densification. Despite its smaller land mass, British cities are much less dense than those on the Continent. Parts of Barcelona and Paris boast 50,000 inhabitants per square kilometre, whereas no square kilometre in England reaches even half that figure.
Under the right circumstances, planning passports could massively accelerate development in the UK. However, as with all planning policies, the devil truly is in the details.This is incredibly exciting ambition from Labour, and we’ll do our part to cheer them on.
Many a politician has tried and failed to fix the UK’s broken housing system. Robert Jenrick’s attempt to bring in a zoning system that would have automatically allowed development was dropped two years later by Michael Gove after backlash from Tory backbenchers like Theresa Villiers.
However, with a Labour government that stood specifically on a platform of pro-housing and pro-growth reforms – and even defeated Villiers herself – might be the ones who finally crack densification.
Lauren Thomas is PricedOut’s research Manager
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