On Alok Sharma's In-Tray

This is a piece that I contributed to the RTPI's Blog.

Which position is the most precarious? Housing & Planning Minister or football manager?

This image, which I came by via @NobleFrancis on Twitter, reveals that Alok Sharma is the fifteenth Housing Minister in twenty years, with the average tenure being just sixteen months.

According to this piece the average tenure of a football manager is also sixteen months.

An incoming football manager can typically expect to inherit a squad that is bereft of form and confidence. An incoming Planning Minister can typically expect to inherit decisions that were just too complicated and policies that were just too difficult for their predecessors to deal with. Alok Sharma’s in-tray seems particularly full, but helpfully for him a House of Commons Library Briefing Paper on Planning Reform Proposals sets out proposed changes that are still yet to be made. These include (in the Briefing Paper’s order):

• Section 106 contributions
• Community Infrastructure Levy
• Local plans and housing requirements
• Housing delivery test
• Fixing housing land supply on an annual basis
• Requirement to plan for housing and strategic priorities
• Incentive to put in place a Local Plan
• Duty to cooperate
• Housing on commuter hubs and commercial land
• A standardised approach to housing requirement calculations
• Upward extensions
• Rural areas
• Release of land for starter homes
• Affordable housing: change of definition
• Consultation on planning and affordable housing for build to rent
• Presumption in favour of brownfield land
• Cutting red tape review
• Roads and infrastructure requirements
• Protected species
• Utility connection to new homes
• Changes to planning application fees
• Garden cities, towns and villages
• Completion notice reform
• Secretary of State planning decisions: time limit
• Fees for making a planning appeal
• Green Belt
• Neighbourhood planning
• Developer’s track record
• Sustainable development and the environment
• Basement development
• Designation for poor performance
• Draft airports national policy statement

Some big things and some less big things, but they were worth listing in full, I reasoned, because in one way or another something in that list will be significant to everybody involved in the planning process, and the planning for new homes particularly. Waiting for these changes to be made, or not to be made, is influencing, to a lesser or greater degree, how planners are going about their business. Leadership is sought.

A number of the proposals, for example, will influence how people will bid for land. If bidding on a subject-to-planning basis the bidder has to anticipate what the policy regime will be when consent is granted, which might be eighteen months away. Does the bidder adopt a ‘worse case scenario’ and risk losing the site with an uncompetitive headline offer? Does the bidder adopt a ‘best case scenario’ and present, in headline terms at least, the best offer, but risk either having to ‘chip’ the purchaser when the policy requirements finally emerge, or wrangle with the LPA over what then, to them, is viable.

A number of these proposals, for example, will influence how people will promote a local plan. The planning policy manager might be prepared to trust in the evidence base, build in as much flexibility to emerging policies as possible, and try to convince an Inspector that there is no future problem so serious that an early review cannot remedy it. The Leader of the Council though, perhaps faced with local elections next year, might adopt a more circumspect approach. What if? What if the draft standard OAN methodology is adopted and does mean we can reduce our housing targets? What if the large strategic sites policy falls foul of a housing delivery test? Our fragile pretence of a 5YHLS will be shattered for good. Let’s just wait and see. There is an irony, of course, in one of the proposals being focussed on incentivising the production of local plans.

The pond of planning policy and guidance is seldom still, but in the recent past the sector has had to anticipate the waves from the Housing & Planning Act 2016, tossed in by the Cameron and Osborne Government, and the waves from this year’s Housing White Paper, which signalled the change of direction being attempted by May and Javid. What hope for a period of tranquillity? Philip Hammond has suggested that the Budget might again include planning reforms, which would be in addition to the revised draft NPPF, expected early in the New Year and the Green Paper on Social Housing that Sajid Javid has announced. Even more for the Minister’s in-tray.

Mr Sharma has noted that Planning Ministers are a bit like Doctor Who and that he is the latest incarnation, but has said that he “hopes to be in place for a decent length of time and to see through many of the reforms that are laid out in the Housing White Paper”.

“We need an evolution over a period of time”, said Crystal Palace Chairman Steve Parish in June when announcing the arrival of manager Frank De Boer. De Boer was sacked after 77 days and 4 matches.