Boris’s planning revolution puts bonfire under regulations to build more beautiful homes

The biggest overhaul of the planning permission system for more than 70 years was launched today by the government with the Prime Minister insisting there will be “no more fiddling around the edges”.

Central to these proposals is the transfer of powers from local authorities to central government. The housing department will set up a “standard model” to distribute an annual housing target between local councils, which will then be forced to release the land required to deliver that goal.

Once they pass the initial planning stage, residents and councillors will have very little say over the new developments, and a new “sustainable development” test will replace environmental and viability assessments. To top this, there will be a drastic reduction in the deadline for the completion of local plans, from seven years at present to 30 months under the new proposals.

These measures will involve a bonfire of regulations, most of which the government considers to be tools for nimbyism, and force local authorities to act more efficiently. The main beneficiaries, Whitehall hopes, will be small developers who in the past have lacked the resources to compete in the planning process with the country’s three largest developers.

The plans will also set the government on a collision course with Conservative councils, however. The standardised distribution model will require affluent areas with the least social housing to release the most land, meaning local authorities in the Home Counties are likely be disproportionately affected. The new sustainable development test will also reduce the involvement of English Heritage, which could anger traditionalist campaigners.

But Conservatives may find some consolation in the fact that the top-loading of the systems means the government can be far more creative in the way it shapes the visual aesthetics of towns and cities, which has become something of a culture war issue in recent years. The Housing Secretary, Robert Jenrick, has already alluded to the creation of a “pattern-book” to dictate what is a good design.

This will be heavily influenced by the findings of the government’s “Building Better, Building Beautiful” Commission, initially chaired by the late Sir Roger Scruton. Its final report, published last January, proposed three key aims for housing reform: “beauty should be an essential condition for planning permission”; “preventing ugliness should be a primary purpose for the planning system”; “settlements should be renewed, regenerated and cared for.”

Jenrick hailed the report as the beginning of a generational change in planning design and promised “to do all I can to help achieve the goal you’ve set in the report’s conclusion – that we should aspire to pass on our heritage, the best of who we are and what we have, to our successors, not depleted but enhance.”

He now has more power than any of his predecessors to bind beautiful guidelines into the rulebook. Indeed, he recently announced a new requirement for tree-lined streets in and around new developments.

There will also be reforms to the myriad of levies and conditions developers have to meet with regards to community contributions and affordable housing. These mostly come under the Community Infrastructure Levy and Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Both will now be scrapped, replaced by a single Infrastructure Levy. The government hopes the reduced complexity and costs will encourage developers to build more units, and therefore reduce the pricing of homes.

Finally, the entire process will go digital-first. Residents can access online all the information about development applications, including the amount they are paying through the new Infrastructure Levy. Currently, stakeholders have to request hundreds of documents to access the same information, so these changes will again speed up the process.

There is much still to be worked out. The intricate nature of the planning system is the main reason previous governments opted to steer clear of wide-reaching reform – perhaps wisely – but Boris Johnson is clearly passionate about the subject. He has long been attracted to building – airport and bridges especially – and considers land-banking by large developers to be a fundamentally unjust practice.

“There are about half a million unused permissions to build, and instead of making use of their opportunities these developers are treating their buyers like serfs… because they know exactly how difficult and expensive it is go get a new home, and to some extent they are making it difficult,” Johnson wrote in a 2018 column for The Telegraph. “They have land, they plainly have the cash, and it is time they used both to build the homes the country needs – and not wall up cats while they are at it.”

The matter clearly continues to animate the Prime Minister. He wants change, fast. Robert Jenrick, the Housing Secretary, has arguably been given more leeway than any other member of the Cabinet. Not only has he survived a scandal in which he was accused of corrupting the planning system, now appears to have been given carte blanche to go to war with nimbys in the wealthiest parts of England. These people also happen to be core Conservative voters.

In that effort, Jenrick has made great use of the policy initiatives of Jack Airey, a think-tanker turned special adviser who was brought into Number 10 as part of Dominic Cummings’s shakeup. A report Airey co-authored for Policy Exchange in January is widely regarded as a precursor for today’s proposals; it called for regulations to be scrapped where possible and insisted that “development rules should be clear and non-negotiable.”

Airey also worked closely with Scruton at the Policy Exchange, co-authoring a report on beautiful housing which recommended the kind of centrally-mandated design recommendations Jenrick appears to have now adopted.

“There should be a process encouraging comparative judgment, with templates for study and a book of existing successful designs, encouraging the exercise of judgment and choice,” the report stated.

Airey is providing the policy answers, then, to Johnson’s instincts, and Jenrick has proven himself capable of pushing through reforms in an organised manner and of getting things done. Together, these three housing musketeers may well transform the built environment around us – and define Boris Johnson’s legacy.