Mike Best at Turley looks at the future of strategic planning under a Labour Government.

At the end of July, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner launched a consultation on reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and promised to take the necessary steps for universal coverage of strategic planning during this Parliament, working in ‘lockstep’ with mayors and council leaders.

Whilst many of the NPPF policy changes will come into effect by the end of the year, planners across the country are eager to see how this new approach to strategic planning will play out in the coming months and years, having seen the previous system of Regional Spatial Strategies dismantled by the previous Government in 2010.

Immediate steps

In housing minister Matthew Pennycook’s letter to housing industry stakeholders published on 30 July, he identified three immediate steps:

- firstly, to beef up the existing Duty to Co-operate for local plans which will continue to be prepared under the current system until the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act takes effect.

- secondly, to work with Mayoral Combined Authorities to explore extending existing powers to prepare Spatial Development Strategies (SDS) as a short-term solution to provide strategic coverage

- thirdly, to identify priority groupings of other authorities where strategic planning would have benefits, and therefore should be fast-tracked ahead of wider possibly legislative changes.

The most obvious locations are those urban areas where the sharing of housing need has been problematic.

Co-operate or what?

The first of these is a prolonging of the Duty to Co-operate which the previous Government introduced but was looking to drop to make life easier for authorities which were struggling to agree the distribution of unmet housing needs from large urban authorities.

This will highlight those potential priority groupings where greater intervention may well be required, but in the short term, the supercharging of the DTC may encourage some authorities to resume discussions with neighbours which had more recently taken a back seat.

Mayoral SDS

Spatial Development Strategies (SDS) were introduced when the London Plan was first prepared and the powers were extended to some Mayoral Combined Authorities depending on the outcome of their Devolution Deals. In practice, they have been rarely used outside of London.

Greater Manchester for instance preferred the preparation of a joint local plan over an SDS. The West of England failed at examination, Liverpool City Region is preparing one based on pre-existing housing numbers agreed between the authorities, and West Yorkshire changed its mind. Two further Combined Authorities have powers to prepare non-statutory spatial frameworks and neither the West nor East Midlands have them in their devolution deals.

Without much experience to fall back on, the new minister and his team will have to work quickly with Mayoral Combined Authorities to convince them that this could be the ‘head start’ the Government needs on the road to universal strategic planning coverage.

The priority groupings of other local authorities will then be waiting in the wings to see if Combined Authority mayors can deliver Spatial Development Strategies with existing governance arrangements in place. It may then be possible to extend those powers beyond Mayoral Combined Authorities.

A revived tier of strategic planning

One of the main criticisms of the last Government’s approach to devolution was the inconsistencies (which some would argue was reflecting local differences) but ultimately led to a lack of comparable approaches to larger-than-local issues like infrastructure provision, the location of strategic employment sites, major urban extensions and new settlements.

There are differing views as to whether the reintroduction of strategic planning should hark back to the evidence-based Regional Spatial Strategies (RSS) of pre-2010 or the even older Strategic Planning Guidance of the late 1980s which in some cases were only a few pages long and dealt only with big picture topics and high-level numbers, leaving more latitude for local authorities to interpret.

Resistance to top-down targets was the start of the downfall of RSS, but the new Government is going to introduce mandatory housing targets through a new Standard Method, so it may be that strategic planning will be the best means by which these numbers can be distributed between local authorities. The new Standard Method shifts the greatest burden from the cities to their adjoining districts so there needs to be some mechanism more effective than the Duty to Co-operate to adjudicate between authorities.

Combined Authority Mayors are the obvious first port of call, but many areas of the country where housing need is greatest are not covered by Mayoral Combined Authorities, so the system will need to be put in place relatively quickly with the support of local leaders who will then have to work effectively with their partners to deliver a new tier of plans for their areas. Could County Authorities provide a sufficiently strategic level of plan-making? Are there areas where more than one county may need to work in concert with each other and with all the local authorities in the area?

Either way, our record of planning for and delivering major infrastructure and development is not great and the priority for any new system must be speeding up decision-making processes so that communities feel their concerns that development often happens ahead of major infrastructure improvements are being addressed. If the set-up takes too long, strategic planning will once again become the victim of its own shortcomings.