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COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE INQUIRY ON PLANNING SKILLS Submission by the Home Builders Federation
Introduction The Home Builders Federation is the trade association representing private sector home builders in England and Wales. Its members are responsible for about 80% of the new homes built each year in England and Wales and range from large national companies to regional and smaller, local firms. The Federation believes that, while there are, of course, many skilled and committed planners within local authorities there are also significant skills and capacity shortfalls affecting the ability of local authorities to achieve successful planning for sustainable communities. The increasing diversity of issues planners are being asked to incorporate in local development plans and in day to day decision making when determining planning applications is also undoubtedly a challenge for planning professionals. This challenge is, however, made more difficult in practice by some more systemic issues facing the planning system.
Systemic Issues i. Spatial Planning Skills A fundamental issue affecting the quality and effectiveness of local authority planning is that the visionary skills required for spatial planning are not nurtured in the right way. For example, new entrants joining local authorities from university planning courses are all too often asked to work on small householder planning applications and similar scale tasks. Understandably such assignments are de-motivating for young professionals whose higher education courses will have focused on the rationale and ability for spatial planning to change things for the better. Without sufficient positive career development, many of the most able new recruits leave to join the private sector with the result that the local authority planning team is under-equipped to formulate and deliver strategic spatial plans. In consequence there are very few people in local authority planning teams who actually possess the ability and track record to develop and deliver properly thought through and substantive strategic plans employing spatial vision. We have seen particular evidence of this shortcoming in the tendency of local authorities to concentrate on producing lots of Supplementary Planning Documents on detailed individual issues but none are producing successful Core Strategies. Most strikingly about 50% of proposed local authority core strategies have been found unsound by the inspector following examination in public because they lack a credible vision. Indeed, just 22 Core Strategies have been adopted since their inception in 2004. Unless this position is improved there must be a real concern that the planning system's capacity to deliver sustainable communities is insufficient.
ii. Leadership, policy integration and Cabinet style government It is also the case that planning does not currently have the consistent support it needs from local authority leaders. The delivery of successful residential development as part of sustainable communities - in particular where this is part of the significant regeneration of an existing urban area - is critically dependent on effective political leadership from authorities. The benefits of such leadership are clear in current best practice examples such as the strategic vision for the regeneration and growth of Plymouth and Birmingham. Where effective political leadership and vision is present it ensures that the array of local authority functions is integrated effectively in policy-making and delivery. In cases where it is absent or insufficient, the effectiveness of policy-making suffers with the objectives of planning, housing, highways and other teams tending to remain within their own silos and reaching sub-optimal compromises between their areas of responsibility. One piece of evidence that bears out the adverse consequences of insufficient policy integration in local authorities is the CABE housing design quality audits carried out across the English regions. The audits have all shown that lack of sufficient urban design capacity in local authorities, coupled with fragmented policy emanating from different teams, is one of the key factors contributing to results which the CABE assessors concluded needed improvement. Another hallmark of good local authority political leadership is that it values and empowers planning professionals, enabling individuals with spatial planning ability and vision to deliver strategic objectives. We have seen this undermined over the past few years as planning issues become politicised rather than seen as a technical or professional analysis and assessment of development projects. The Federation also considers that in recent years the Cabinet style of local government organisation has unintentionally become an additional potential obstacle to effective spatial planning. Under the Cabinet style of government, planning, with its quasi-judicial role, sits outside the Cabinet itself. This has the effect of devaluing planning, making it more likely that planning receives less resource and less political support. That, in turn, discourages recruitment and retention of talented planning staff. The Federation considers therefore that the impact of Cabinet-style local government on the effectiveness of planning should be reviewed with the objective of correcting this situation. Specific skills and capacity issues Underlying the systemic issues, there are a number of specific areas in which the Federation believes there are currently skills gaps or shortfalls effecting local authority planning. i. Understanding of development economics An understanding of development economics is critical to successful planning for sustainable communities. A great deal of planning is based on tests of reasonableness and viability and any vision for sustainable development, including regeneration, is therefore necessarily dependent on understanding commercial drivers that determine the level and nature of development - including the willingness of landowners to sell land for development. Overall the Federation and its members find that many officers and elected members lack a sufficient understanding of development economics with the result that there can be a mismatch between proposed policy objectives and the feasibility of their delivery by developers. Such mismatches clearly undermine success in seeking to create sustainable communities given the important role of the private sector in delivery. One means of trying to manage this skills shortfall can be to use consultants or standard toolkits - for example, for determining levels of affordable housing provision or infrastructure requirements. In the Federation's experience, however, the skills can be lacking in officers to make proper and effective use of such resources. Overall therefore the Federation considers that a major effort is required to provide training for members and officers to assist them in formulating and implementing successful policies for sustainable communities taking full account of development economics. These are points we made in our submission to Sir John Egon's Review of skills for sustainable communities. In the interim the need to foster such skills has grown given the increasingly sophisticated view of policy-making in this field. ii. Carbon reduction and climate change The arrival of an important new set of national planning policy requirements under the recent PPS on climate change is a further major skills challenge for local authority officers and members. The PPS's focus on the ways in which planning policy can facilitate the provision of new low and zero carbon energy supply and achieve development that helps mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change will require the acquisition of much new knowledge by planners. Such requirements will include an understanding of the capabilities and implications of different technologies and forms of energy supply, their economics and the possibilities and issues presented by the regulatory rules for the energy market. These, in turn, will raise a new set of issues in terms of development economics - both for new energy systems themselves and their potential use as part of new development. There will also be a need to build knowledge and understanding of the wide range of issues related to mitigating and managing the effects of climate change as a whole. The need is extensive - ranging from successfully integrating climate change issues in urban design through flooding and biodiversity to questions of strategic vision on future land use. These climate change related skills requirements will also mean a greater need to work in partnerships with a wider group of companies and other bodies. Climate change will therefore increase the need for leadership skills and the ability of members and officers to possess skills that enable them to run multi-stakeholder processes successfully. There is no denying that planners are embracing the concept of mitigation for and strategies to avoid climate change. However, few of these are grounded in the reality of delivery stemming from a lack of technical knowledge of the implications of high level policy at the delivery end of development. This lack of skill is critical to any successful implementation of government strategy.
John Slaughter Director of External Affairs, Home Builders Federation
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