Community led Strategic Planning: If Not Your Back Yard, Then Where?

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Like many within the industry I watched the 21st June Parliamentary debate on planning with a mixture of excitement (“Ooo look at planning right there at the top of the political agenda!”) and horror (“but, but, the bill hasn’t been written yet!”, “what even is a Developer’s Charter!?”) 

Although the debate expanded to cover failures of the current system, the housing crisis, land banking, infrastructure, green space and the environment, the starting point was an issue of local democracy. Namely, the fear that a Planning Bill could remove the rights of residents to comment on (let’s be honest, object to) individual applications. 

The white paper proposes a simplification of Local Plans to focus on identifying land under three categories: growth, renewal and protected. In “growth” areas outline approval would automatically be secured. In such a system, respondents could comment on the details of development, but any objections to principle would be shifted forward in the process, during the production of the Local Plan. 

I’m sympathetic to the concerns. Engagement in Local Plan processes is notoriously low. A YouGov poll showed that 69 percent of respondents had not engaged with a Local Plan consultation, rising to 80 percent for 18–34-year-olds. In a new system barriers to participating would need to be dismantled and the burden of this could easily fall on Local Authorities already stretched to breaking point. 

However, if the right government support is given, it could provide a more meaningful way of engaging with the principle of development in a particular location. At application stage if you object to the principle, you simply say “not here”. If you are meaningfully engaged with the strategic distribution of housing numbers at a Local Plan stage, you’re deciding where development should go, rather than where it shouldn’t. 

I was shaken from my dreamscape of positive strategic planning by a recent Guardian article, describing the angst “tearing apart” a community in West Sussex as the try to decide where to build 16,000 new homes. One resident said ““It’s tough luck for one of us and we just want to make sure the one of us is not us.” 

I remain ever hopeful. Let’s imagine for a moment that we have resolved the legitimate concerns around how such housing numbers are calculated, and that the design quality of the resulting development will be good (don’t laugh!). Wouldn’t it be incredible to get residents using a shared mapping platform to plot constraints, think about infrastructure and identify locations for the total number of required homes? Of course, the first individual reaction might be “not in my back yard” but after that, pragmatic choices would have to be made, and the resulting cumulative picture might give shape to something fair and logical.

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