The reputation of town planning among some politicians and the media has hit rock bottom. Those values the TCPA sees as intrinsic to planning – democratic accountability, community participation, sustainable development and social justice – are in the process of being extinguished in favour of the primacy of GDP growth. This regressive shift is the product of a powerful economic orthodoxy that categorises planning policies, such as minimum design standards, to be blockers to growth because they incur costs to the private sector. This simplistic idea has become an article of faith in Whitehall for the past half century – and best summarised as: democratic planning bad, free market development good.
Our purpose here is not to challenge the view that regulation generates costs –although the extent of those costs is contested. We accept that town planning involves the regulation of land use and entails costs to landowners and developers. The key question is: can these costs be justified in the public interest?
There are two fundamental errors in framing planning as a market blocker. First, orthodox economic analysis accounts for none of the multiple benefits which planning regulation provides. Second is the failure to consider the real-world consequences if we pursue this growth-first orthodoxy to its logical conclusions.
In refusing to consider the benefits of planning, orthodox economists have created a question that answers itself: how can a bureaucratic system of regulation without any benefit be beneficial? The result of this partial analysis is a dangerous line of argument that pursues deregulation regardless of the obvious costs to the economy, to society and to the individual. The think tank Centre for Cities recently suggested planning “restrictions” such as Building Safety Gateway 2 and minimum space standards should be removed. To be clear, these restrictions are about ensuring fire safety and minimum room sizes. Advocates of removing such basic safeguards make no attempt to account for the economic, environmental and above all human costs that result from deregulation.
In fact, no comprehensive econometric study of the full benefits and costs of the English planning system has ever been undertaken. This is a remarkable fact, given the crude way planning is dismissed as a burden on growth. It ignores the health and wider societal costs of failing to provide decent housing – conservatively costed at more than £18.5bn every year, according to the Building Research Establishment.
It ignores that strategic planning ensures future homes address potential flood and fire risks and are therefore insurable. There are even more fundamental aspects of planning which orthodox economic analysis dismisses out of hand, notably democratic accountability and public participation. Despite little evidence that either of these factors produce unnecessary “delay” instead of being an important part of due process, the current government has embarked on an unprecedented set of reforms that cut democratic voice out of local planning decisions.
Removing democratic accountability will come with extremely high political costs – which will also carry economic consequences. Locking people out of those decisions which shape their communities leaves them with only two options: legal challenge, if they can afford it, or – more likely – direct action. Direct action campaigns regarding planning have a potent past, from the 1980s roads programme protests to more recent opposition to fracking. Ultimately, failing to secure planning decisions with people’s legitimate engagement will increase, rather than decrease, the time required to deliver those decisions.
What are the implications of a deregulated, unplanned world? According to the Centre for Cities, we should look back, before the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, to the unregulated free-for-all of cheap housing built during the industrial revolution. Somehow, they have forgotten the slum conditions that were produced – conditions linked to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and at great cost to those who had to be rehoused.
We do not have to rely solely on historical record to understand the human cost of free-market dogma. In 2013, the bonfire of planning red tape took the form of expanding what are called “permitted development rights”. This form of deregulation allows developers to convert existing buildings for residential use, avoiding national and local planning policy, as well as some building regulations.
At the bottom end of the market, permitted development has produced some of the most unsafe and shameful housing conditions in 21st-century England. For example, Kendal Court, a former light industrial building in Newhaven, was converted to 54 flats through permitted development. The tiny studio flats were mouldy, poorly ventilated, with no space for laundry facilities – and the nearest laundrette and shops several miles away. Residents described living there as prison-like.
Fundamentally, viewing the planning system as a blocker to growth is a crude fantasy that bears no relation to planning’s real purpose or democratic basis. This caricature is sustained primarily because deregulation is an embedded assumption in the Treasury’s growth and productivity models. As former Labour leader Neil Kinnock commented recently: “I regret to say that our highly intelligent ministers, and they’re all wonderful people, in the Treasury… have accepted the Treasury nostrums.” The problem is that this central assumption in the Treasury’s analysis is wrong.
What is certain is that the loss of the postwar Labour governments’ great legacy of democratic planning will be bad. It will be bad for our economy, bad for our environment, and bad our quality of life for generations to come.
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