The government’s new draft Planning and Infrastructure Bill includes key policies to get Britain building more homes to support Labour’s ambitious 1.5 million home targets. Our CEO, Tom Chance, shares reflections on these proposed policies, what the government is trying to achieve and how these could affect CLTs.
Feature image: Oxfordshire CLT
The government has published its draft Planning and Infrastructure Bill with a lot of fanfare about getting Britain building.
But will it help communities build?
There are four areas in the bill likely to affect community land trusts: reforms to planning committees, planning fees, compulsory purchase, and environmental protections and levies.
It’s all broadly positive for community led developers. These measures might make the planning system a bit faster, and might reduce some of the cost and complexity around topics like nutrient neutrality. Theoretically, parish and town councils might also use compulsory purchase powers to get land into CLTs for development – though public authorities are notoriously reluctant to get into CPO battles.
We have written a briefing going over each of these reforms in more detail. We explain what the government is trying to achieve, and how they might affect CLTs.
But stepping back and looking at our lobbying asks around planning, these reforms don’t make a big difference. Review our English lobbying asks here and our Welsh lobbying asks here.
They don’t do much to reverse the growing cost and complexity of the planning process for applicants. A couple of years ago we estimated, in a study for the Competition and Markets Authority, that it costs CLTs £11k per home to pay for all the consultants’ reports covering parking, nutrients, light, design, ecology and so on. This is more than most CLTs pay for their land!
We don’t want to see standards watered down. But we think the approach taken in the bill to nature protection could be a model for a wider shift – to deal with complex challenges like climate change, biodiversity, transport and design at the strategic level and leave small developers like CLTs with some simple rule-based standards to follow.
The reforms also don’t make the system any more predictable. We have successfully lobbied for changes to the National Planning Policy Framework and we want these to go further. Our basic argument is: if a community wishes to grow to meet local needs, and does so through a democratic CLT with local support and without profit, the planning system should be facilitating this, with an assumption that the answer is ‘yes’. All the while ensuring that profit-led, speculative development is tightly controlled to meet the objectives of the Local Plan.
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill takes us a few steps forward, but we will keep lobbying for the big leap that we need.