Interpreting ‘Simplified’ National Planning Policy and Local Plan-Making

The Coalition Government’s (CG) core aim to ‘simplify’ the planning system by ‘streamlining’ the (perceived) significant amount of national planning policy and guidance, which they argued had been developing since the formal inception of town and country planning in 1947 and proliferated under the New Labour governments 1997-2010, was one broadly shared by the planning senior practitioners (SPs).

The findings suggest that they also felt that the planning system had become increasingly complex, and so their criticisms of the NPPF was not its stated aims for simplification and streamlining, but ironically rather that these policy reforms had actually made things more complicated and uncertain in practice.

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One example of the ‘unintended consequences’ of increased practice uncertainty following attempted simplification was the subsequent need for further government policy clarification on the NPPF through the development of associated National Planning Policy Guidance (NPPG), particularly as it became evident that the policy ‘framework’ needed to be fleshed-out in particular key areas to better support practitioners. This context of uncertainty was exacerbated by the need for planners to operate and deliver the new policy reforms whilst simultaneously adapting to a ‘localist’ governance structure far removed from the previous regional ‘spatial planning’ approach that had been developing 2001-2010.

The NPPG steadily built-up from 2014 to cover over 50 core ‘guidance’ areas intended to supplement the NPPF. However, despite government recognition that they needed to further develop and explain their position on national policy, some SPs interpreted NPPG as ‘policy through the back-door’. They expressed practical concerns over its weight in decision-making given its less clearly defined material status in relation to the NPPF, which was already intended to be flexible and negotiable in practice. One main concern was that different planning inspectors had given different weight between ‘core’ national framework policy and practice ‘guidance’. This led to the irony that certain parts of the planning system had actual become more uncertain and complicated as a result of policy consolidation and deregulation:

“I think my reflection on what happened in 2010, and I think it is probably fair to say that this in my view happens every-time there is a reform of planning, is that the government says that they are going to make it more straightforward, but what they actually do is make it more complicated…I think the National Planning Policy Framework was a good idea, I think it was a really good idea to streamline all the numerous planning guidance, regulations and all the rest of it at the national level…and of course that’s fine, but then the one document proves not enough to be sufficient, so you then start to get lots of additional pieces of Planning Policy Guidance” (SP2, Rural, South East).

“[W]hen the Coalition government said that they were going to look at planning and simplify it we thought thank goodness for that, but it hasn’t happened has it [laughter]. Simplifying it in terms of permitted development, it may have made certain categories of development more permitted, but in terms of simplifying the process, it hasn’t. And we have got a multitude of different notification processes, and some require prior notification and some don’t, and some are time limited and some are not, so planning is ever more complicated” (SP5, Mixed, South West).

“The NPPG, I don’t know why they brought that in, because they had been simplifying all the planning guidance since the NPPF, and then to bring in the NPPG, which a lot of inspectors interpret as national policy as well, so it is just policy through the backdoor. So they had made a good step forward, and I think the NPPF is a good document and a good idea and worked well;

but then they brought the NPPG which was another whole raft of requirements, which I don’t think they really meant it to work that way, but that’s what happened” (SP11, Major Urban, West Midlands).

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It was commonly acknowledged by the SPs that the evolution of the planning system in England since the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act had been quite settled for long periods of time, with big gaps between key pieces of legislation and amendments to the 1947 Act in 1947, 1971 and 1990. However, that this context of planning ‘stability’ had been changing since 2004, following which the temporal gaps between key policy reforms and legislative acts were becoming gradually and progressively shorter demonstrated by changes in 2004, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016 respectively. This supports the planning literature that highlights the relationship between neoliberalism and increased attempts at planning reforms in the UK (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2013, Lord and Tewdwr-Jones, 2014).

Indeed, for SP1, the planning system had changed from one characterised by ‘relative stability’ to one permanently being subjected to ‘a raft of changes’; a practice context that made it difficult for planners to carefully plan for the development of their locality against the background of ‘initiative overload’.

SPs understood the increasing reforms since 2004 as a symptom of a series of ‘experimental’ policy initiatives being implemented to try to tackle individual issues, without there being any real coherent government ‘game plan’ for the overall objectives planning system beyond political ‘blunt messages’

around the need to increase housing numbers and supporting growth. A situation that was exacerbated through the overarching aspatial and permissive NPPF that further perpetuated a context of uncertainty:

“There are all these series of different initiatives, but they are not a series of initiatives that fit into a blueprint of ‘this is how we want all of these bits to work together’…[I]t goes back to there being this lack of a sense of what we are doing as a country, and as a country what we want from our planning system. And the fact that governments of whatever colour it is [political ideology] have to keep on coming back and changing it tends to suggest that they don’t really know, and they are just in initiative overdrive” (SP1, Urban, South East).

What made this context worse, to the frustration of SPs, was concerns that their professional views were being superficially requested by the government through consultations on reform; however, that their inputs were not being given due consideration because policy objectives had been predetermined:

“It feels again that things are happening too quickly. The consultations that we have had recently, no sooner has one consultation finished, then the technical consultation is out on things that were in the previous consultation. Well, you can't tell me that you [government] are going to give due consideration to things when you have already made you mind up and coming out with a technical consultation” (SP16, Mixed, West Midlands).

This supports the literature that the Coalition Government (CG) had already decided the broad policy direction they wanted planning reforms to take to ‘fix’ the system; roughly the deregulation of planning, but whilst maintaining some core mechanisms to support growth, heritage and greenbelt preservation

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and community engagement. However, they needed to give the impression that their approach to reform was based on professional consultation as an ‘evidence-base’, regardless of how such evidence was actually used in national policy formation. One way this can be explained is through post-political theory (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012) as an attempt by elite actors to manufacture ‘consensus’

and control the discourse on planning.

Furthermore, government claims that the NPPF would ‘free’ planners from thousands of pages of onerous policy regulation and allow them to adopt approaches more suited to their local development context is misleading; drawing on depoliticisation theory (Burnham, 2001, Foster et al., 2014), these reforms did not necessarily mean or translate into less national government control over local planning:

“[T]he whole tenure of the changes then, through the National Planning Policy Framework, were supposed to be about simplification of the planning system, and initially it did seem to do very much that. But unsurprisingly, again where something is not quite well articulated you have to interpret that through the National Planning Practice Guidance that came out, and then of course inevitably in case law as well. So I don’t think really it has changed the whole tenure of planning at all, in that we are still subject to government controls over planning in one guise or another, but now in large part with things being decided through case law. And that includes things like judicial reviews, and I would say appeals as well; because we have had a lot of planning by appeal to test out elements of the National Planning Policy Framework and the Guidance” (SP9, Mixed, West Midlands).

Here SP9 keenly notes how planning is still subjected to government control, but that the nature of this control is less direct/explicit and being conducted/managed/enforced by other actors; such as in the development industry (further empowered through a favourable pro-development policy environment) and legal system tasked with interpreting and upholding national policy for plan-making and appeals.

So whilst the deregulated and localist approach to governing ostensibly appeared to stand in contrast to New Labour’s more direct forms of control through strict national audit and performance target systems, under the CG state power was enacted more subtly ‘at a distance’. The overall ‘rules of the game’ were still being controlled by central government post-2010, but planners and stakeholders now had slightly improved scope to work within and through the more flexible planning framework. In other words, drawing on governmentality theory (Foucault et al., 2008), planner’s ‘conduct of conduct’ was still being ‘governed’ (towards acting ‘responsibly’ according to neoliberal ideology), but now within a policy context that rhetorical espoused ‘empowerment’ through greater individual and local freedom and autonomy. In this way, the NPPF and localism agenda formed a structural context that paradoxically both heavily constrained planning agency whilst also opening up new spaces for autonomous action.

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This marked the complexity and double-edged sword of the NPPF and localism agenda for planners, they ostensibly had more room for manoeuvre but were still limited within the confines of national policy. Indeed, for Allmendinger and Haughton (2014, p. 48), the CG approach to national planning policy was ‘presented rhetorically as a mechanism that empowers local actors, yet it also creates an obscured policy space within which different interpretations of the Big Society can be projected: the NPPF is both a product of and a process through which post-political planning operates’. In this sense, whilst the NPPF arguably achieved its aims of simplifying policy, placing greater emphasis on pro-development and preservation objectives and increasing the scope for community decision-making in planning, its (perhaps deliberate) ambiguity meant that planning and development practices became subject to a ‘free-for-all’ where everything is potentially negotiable within the flexible and interpretive framework of national policy. This meant that the NPPF could be interpreted differently by stakeholders to support divergent planning positions at the local scale and in relation to the same local policy/project.

For SPs, the development of Local Plans, and managing their implementation, is an extremely resource and time intensive activity; however, such planning activity is justified on the basis that planning in England is still regulated according to a ‘plan-led’ system (Parker and Doak, 2012). Paragraph 12 of the NPPF reaffirmed the government commitment to this approach by stating that ‘[t]his National Planning Policy Framework does not change the statutory status of the development plan as the starting point for decision making. Proposed development that accords with an up-to-date Local Plan should be approved, and proposed development that conflicts should be refused unless other material considerations indicate otherwise. It is highly desirable that local planning authorities should have an up-to-date plan in place’. However, despite the claimed primary role of Local Plans in national policy, SPs argued that challenges based on the presumption, five-year supply, objectively assessed need, viability and neighbourhood plans could routinely clash, appeal, modulate or override their LPA development plans and polices. This has challenged the professional status of planning/planners as the flexible, interpretive, and negotiable nature of the NPPF provides greater scope for a variety of different interpretations and understandings of the meanings and weight behind national and local policies:

“You know, we have gone from the mountains of guidance and specific details to a much slimmer version of that, which again leads people to different interpretations of things. So again it is much more of a mine field than it [planning system] was historically…So it is much more complex scene, I think, in that period [2010-15]. And I suppose expectations have gone up, in terms of a lot more people are expecting to have very detailed explanations of the decision-making process, the technicalities behind it, everybody is almost an ‘armchair planner’. You know, ‘Actually my interpretation of the NPPF is different to yours, so my view is just as valid as anyone else’s’. So I think it has sort of opened up the conversation about planning, which has been quite challenging” (SP6, Rural, South East).

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This has opened up space for greater contestation and debate between different actors, primarily LPAs, developers, environmentalists and local communities. This new policy landscape may be welcomed by a range of planning theorist for different reasons; for collaborative planning theorist the opening-up of (networked) stakeholders to negotiate an agreed position would be a positive intervention (Healey, 2003, Booher and Innes, 2002), whilst agonistic planning theorist value the contestation and conflict as a necessary prerequisite to protect democratic decision-making (Hillier, 2003, McClymont, 2011). In this respect, whilst the CG post-2010 reforms have meant that the professional status and role of (the traditional ‘rational’) planners is now more susceptible to competing expectations, interpretations and stakeholder interests as a result of the system being ‘opened-up’ under the NPPF and localism, the jury is still out on whether this represents a positive or negative intervention in the context of neoliberalism.

Such practice changes are important because the ‘plan-led’ system approach is based on the normative understanding that ‘good planning’ involves professional planners having a certain degree of influence over the types and locations of developments, as a means to regulate their local impacts and manage broader concerns for sustainability and interests; however, rather than being empowered, LG planners expressed that these national policy reforms had served to undermine their local policy and practices:

“I think the other thing the NPPF has done is actually take a lot of flexibility away from local planning authorities; because one of the things that is really evident to me is that in many, many circumstances the NPPF trumps local policy. We had a situation in [local authority]

recently where we had an application that was recommended for refusal by officers, refused by members, then went to appeal. And when the inspector’s decision came through it read as though it was going to be appeal dismissed, because the inspector agreed with many of our judgements about the planning merits of our case. But almost at the end of the decision letter he said, “However, I believe this is a sustainable site, and therefore in the context of the National Planning Policy Framework I am going to allow the appeal”. So I know that the councillors, both here and at [neighbouring local authority], are of the view that, you know, in many instances it does not actually matter what decision they make, because an inspector is going to come along and give the NPPF far more weight than they give local policies and grant planning permission” (SP2, Rural, South East).

In this context, the strength of their Local Plan and/or policy-base was a source of anxiety for planners, particularly given the potential to succumb to ‘planning by appeal’. It was acknowledged that local policy now needed to be ‘robust’ enough to withstand both high levels of technical scrutiny and legal challenges from developers as well as political opposition and resistance from their local communities, particularly over housing land supply calculations and allocated figures. These tensions gained greatest expression as the ‘chasm’ between government national policy and local planning on the ground:

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“As soon as somebody says, “We have got this idea to streamline and speed up the planning system”, I can guarantee you now the two things it will not do is streamline and speed up the planning system; because planning is really complicated. And if somebody says, “I’m going to streamline something”, it means they are trying to cut a corner somewhere, and planning is something that has got legal challenges at every corner…whatever system we operate, it has got to be bomb proof, it has got to be capable of being beserked to the point of High Court of Appeal type of challenges that you are going to get from the Gladmans of this world. If the system isn’t robust enough, or we end up producing a Local Plan that is based on some sort of Memorandum of Understanding from a Combined Authority, but actually that isn’t worth anything, it’s like standing on sand isn’t it. So I think that is the big thing that is missing for me, there is this huge gap between government setting law and the NPPF, all the guidance, and the rest of it, and what they do in [neighbouring council], for example, is a massive, massive jump” (SP23, Rural, Yorkshire and the Humber).

“[T]he other big issue I think is that there is this wish, or instruction should we say, that councils will produce Local Plans in a timely manner, and the whole process has just gotten more and more complicated. And when I see the lists of evidence that we as a local planning authority have to produce to back up our Local Plans it really is no wonder that it takes such a long time for a Local Plan to be produced. Because again if you don’t have solid evidence you are going to get torn to pieces at an examination by the development industry or by those that oppose your plan” (SP2, Rural, South East).

“The importance of the certainty of the Local Plan is something…we really prided ourselves on, because we have seen neighbouring authorities who have for whatever reason found it difficult to get a Local Plan in place. They have had five-year land supply issues and had to deal with unwanted applications in unwanted locations and choose very carefully their battles with Section 78 appeals. We have certainly seen them approve applications on or near the boundary with us and we know they have done it because they know they won't stand a chance at appeal; and they haven't got the resources to put into arguing an appeal.

So that lack of certainty is really key, and the more destabilising of the Local Plan process then the more that uncertainty starts to rule, then you get ‘planning by appeal’” (SP16, Mixed, West Midlands).

A number of SPs also raised a counter-argument to the government and developer claims of increased costs, risk and uncertainty for development projects where an LPA lacks a Local Plan, stating that the development industry could often use that as an opportunity to exploit the planning permission system:

A number of SPs also raised a counter-argument to the government and developer claims of increased costs, risk and uncertainty for development projects where an LPA lacks a Local Plan, stating that the development industry could often use that as an opportunity to exploit the planning permission system: