Aaron Wells explains how Labour’s new Planning and Infrastructure Bill is unlikely to untangle the political problems in the planning process that plays such a large part in Britain’s building crisis. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner MP talks a big game about ‘taking on the blockers’ who stand in the way of development, but NIMBYism and Britain’s building malaise are products of a hollowed-out politics and regulatory state that the Labour Party is in a very weak position to challenge.
In early December last year, and to the outrage of local politicians around the country, the Labour government released its updated National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). This framework governs the Byzantine process through which new housing gets to be built, or doesn’t. Elected on a pledge to ‘get Britain building again’, the new NPPF contains new, higher house-building targets for nearly every local authority in the country, backed by stern threats that central government will punish councils that stand in the way of their programme to build 1.5m houses over the next five years.
The government has already stepped in directly to thwart the ambitions of some districts to block major housing projects. For example, Swale Borough Council in Kent was set to refuse a development of 8,400 homes around the town of Sittingbourne, but three hours before the meeting where a decision was to be made, the government ‘called-in’ the decision – essentially stripping it from the council.
This reassertion of the authority and primacy of the central state and its national mandate represents progress of a sort. However, without rebuilding the legitimacy and capacity of the state, the new approach is as likely to exacerbate rather than mollify the politics of local planning.
Except in rare cases of nationally significant infrastructure, the control of, and responsibility for, managing building falls to lower-tier local governments: city, district, borough and unitary councils. Governed by the arcane NPPF and local development plans, planning is officially a non-political process. Teams of council planning officers, professional employees of the council, assess proposed developments on a case-by-case basis in line with the NPPF and local planning rules, and councillors nominally vote to approve or reject planning applications in accordance with their interpretation of planning policy. The technocratic and quasi-judicial nature of this process is enshrined in law – decisions can be overturned in the courts, and the planning officers of local councils are more likely to approve projects than elected councillors. When councillors refuse a development against the recommendations of planning officers, developers can take the council to the Planning Inspectorate – which functions like a planning committee run by the government, and can overturn the decisions of councils for coming to the wrong conclusion under the terms of the NPPF. This fact is central to local councillors’ claim to stand for local democracy, and local people, and against the national government and developers.
The originally-American epithet NIMBY – ‘not in my back yard’ – has now penetrated the political lexicon such that many council officers, councillors, party members and NIMBYs themselves are aware of it. Anti-housing NIMBYs are without a doubt one of the most organised political forces at the level of local government, and exert more coordinated and sustained pressure on local councils than traditional representative bodies like trade unions could dream of. The demographic structure of NIMBY activism is essentially what parody would have you believe, and represents the demographics of the politically engaged more broadly. They are overwhelmingly old and often pensioners, lower to upper-middle class, homeowners, and often highly educated. If they work, they are usually professionals, managers or small business owners. Many are also involved with what passes for civil society organisations – campaign groups, charities and the like. They are of exactly the same sort of demographic which dominates elected local councils themselves – which is part of why they so successfully bend the ear of councillors.
While some partisans may try to claim otherwise, NIMBYism is a cross-party phenomenon in local government. It is widely known that the Greens and Liberal Democrats – craving the votes of the rural middle class – make anti-development messaging central to local campaigning. However, the differences between the way in which Tory, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green councillors oppose development are more of style than substance. With the exception of some Greens, nearly all politicians will readily admit there is a need for more housing – especially social, council and affordable properties. And all will also make the right noises about both environmental concerns and already decrepit infrastructure. A common refrain is that ‘we want the right sort of houses in the right places’, or some variation thereof. For most local politicians this isn’t cynical, they may well believe that there is a way of fulfilling the desperate need for more houses without making anyone unhappy. Of course, these right sorts of houses and prime locations seldom seem to present themselves to planning committees.
Councillors wildly overestimate the popularity of anti-housebuilding sentiment, just as they tend to vastly exaggerate the extent to which anyone really knows or cares what they do. Scarcely anyone votes in local elections, even fewer consistently engage with local politics, and fewer still are active members of political parties. Village and suburb-dwelling NIMBYs will often lobby councillors and turn up to protest at planning committee meetings where large developments are to be decided. Creatures of the void that they are, to local councillors these eccentric little platoons seem like the expression of a major social constituency to whom they should listen. When local party or council meetings struggle to attract more than a handful of participants, a group of 30 protestors outside the district council chamber may seem a little bit like mass politics. Just like existing political parties, their eccentricity, and specific demographic, further shows the average passing observer that politics and campaigning is not something by or for them. They only appear as a major force because collective political associations are almost non-existent outside the world of elite institutions.
Further muddying the water is the constant involvement of town and parish councils. Sitting below district, borough, city and unitary authorities, these even lower tiers of local government must be consulted by the tier above on any development within their area, though they don’t hold direct decision-making power in planning matters. These are the rotten boroughs of our time, and often include at least some members who hold seats in other levels of local government. It’s not uncommon for a politician to hold seats on a parish or town, district and county council. The involvement of these bodies – which generally object to any development at all in their area – is another stumbling block to development which can cloak itself as a democratic exercise. Town and parish councils could be abolished overnight and for the most part only people who sit on or work for them would notice, until next years’ village fete. Despite the paucity of their mandates, members of all levels of local government will usually insist to the bitter end that their word on local decisions should be final. This reflects an ideological trait shared by most local politicians, especially on the left – that local politics is somehow purer, more legitimate, more truly representative than the national. In the world of local government academia and think-tankery, this preoccupation with the superiority of a local mandate over a national one is such that one leading academic in the field, Professor Colin Copus, has even argued that councils should enjoy some kind of ‘local sovereignty’ over their jurisdiction.
Anyone who has attended planning meetings being protested, or read objections to developments, will be familiar with the hysterical tone which pervades the rhetoric of much NIMBYism. In the NIMBY umwelt they are the noble hobbits, defending the land and its people from the rapacious, suited Uruk-hai of the property development industry. Like almost every other party and movement in the void, they seek to present themselves as the real anti-establishment force. Allegations of corruption run rampant in anti-housing activism. The rumoured exchange of ‘brown envelopes’ from developers to councillors is touted openly by many NIMBYs – the allegation being that local councillors get financially rewarded for approving developments. Of course, this almost never actually happens, as far as anyone can tell.
The planning process is quite transparent for anyone who cares to sift through hundreds or thousands of pages of reports from developers and their consultants. However, the process is dry and technocratic, conducted in untold numbers of documents barely legible to anyone other than experts in the particular field relevant to the reports in question. In our generally diminished political sphere, this more or less open but stultifyingly dull process of technocratic decision takes on the moral character formerly reserved for grand struggles of politics. Unpopular decisions are seen as necessarily the result of corruption and immorality. Local planning has become a morality play for many of its participants.
To many anti-housing activists planning represents the struggle with an illegitimate, corrupt, moneyed and immoral establishment which disregards local interests in favour of profit, and national political goals. This ideological component of NIMBYism is a large part of why the state needs not only the financial means to build more, but the legitimate authority to justify it. When the state is seen as a legitimate representative of the nation, it can justify exerting its authority to quash obstructive local lawfare and ignore small-scale local opposition to projects which are in the national interest. The state as it stands clearly does not have that legitimacy, and it protects in law the rights of any activist with the time and money to hold up major projects through the courts. As the new government seeks to insist on its housing targets, it would be a welcome development if it more openly uses ministerial and parliamentary powers to tear through the midden of High Court cases it will likely face relating to controversial major projects.
National politicians simply cannot help themselves but genuflect to the control of local communities over development, this language is present even in the new government’s stance – where they insist that councils will and should retain control over development, while making very clear that house-building will be forced on them if they seek to block it. Of course, no politician wants to look like they are openly arguing for the central state to ride roughshod over local communities, but more importantly most are unable or unwilling to argue that the larger collective mandate of a democratic national government can and should sometimes override the concerns of the supposed representatives of people in their localities. As the new government locks horns with local councils—especially those in the home counties, and others abutting major cities, that are rich with Green Belt land— they will be forced to argue more openly for the supremacy of the national state.
Local politics, much like national politics, is populated by hollow parties and enthralled to a facsimile of civil society in the form of local neighbourhood campaigns, activist groups and NGOs. The institutions of local government are paradoxically even more remote from the interests, concerns and passions of much of the public than national politics is – the void begins at home. National politics can at least occasionally pique the interest of most of the country, even if it is only at the polls. Any political project serious about deepening and extending democratic authority needs to reckon with this paradox. It is evidently in the national interest, to build more houses and the public infrastructure to support them and a growing population, and to lower housing costs, especially for younger people. But, in the absence of mass political movements with an organic connection to significant proportions of the public, any extension of ‘local democracy’ as it stands over planning would unavoidably result in its hijacking by middle-class NIMBYs, and even less development. As such, the solution to these local problems will inevitably start nationally. This is not to say that local government is always necessarily a stumbling block to the fulfilment of national goals, or that local government should not play a large part in a project of national development. But it is to say that as things stand, with sclerotic parties, and a dearth of mass representative politics, the policy goals of a project of popular sovereignty must begin nationally, and assert the primacy of the national interest over local ones. People must imagine themselves part of a nation before they are part of a neighbourhood. Indeed, if local government is to be anything more than a syndicate protecting the convenience of its residents from increased traffic and noise, locality must be recognised as a part of the nation.
Having said that, it must also be recognised that NIMBYism, like all political forces, is a response to actual phenomena. Infrastructure really is crumbling. Public services are decrepit and can barely deliver their sub-standard amenities to the population that many towns and cities already have. Newbuild homes often look abominable and are sometimes built to poor architectural, safety and energy efficiency standards. Local authorities barely have the money to run basic services, let alone build homes themselves, so huge private developers are responsible for almost all major building.
This is grist to the ideological mill of anti-housebuilding sentiment which posits itself as anti-establishment. Planning policy is explicitly written with this premise in mind – the private sector builds homes, not the state. The NPPF defines developments as financially viable in terms of profit – a ‘viable’ development is one which generates 15-20% profit on Gross Development Value for the developers. Local councils must treat this with the force of law – developments can be built without affordable housing if its inclusion would compromise this profit margin, to the displeasure of everyone except the developers. As it stands, nobody is building houses for free. However, if the void between governors and governed is to be filled again, and the state made more responsive to popular demands, it must have both the legitimacy and capacity to undertake development itself – from residential homes to infrastructure and energy projects – with the explicit recognition that the delivery of public goods is not a profit-seeking exercise.
As it stands, with a government elected by barely one-in-five eligible adults, political legitimacy for nationally-imposed development is in short supply. This, plus the aforementioned infrastructure issues, means that if the government does succeed in ramping up the rate of housebuilding, much of this development will be perceived no better than it is already – as a blight on road traffic and local services – and it will face the same lawfare and activist hostility which development already attracts. Much of the financial heft required to convert activist ire into actual legal hurdles already comes from directly government-funded bodies like Natural England and influential charities such as the Council for the Protection of Rural England. Such organisations will no doubt busy themselves further with obstructing the new government’s targets over the coming years.
The precise structures required to rebuild the state’s capacity for construction are beyond the scope here, but would likely require government-backed corporations which hire their own architects, planners and so on. The previous Tory government sought to circumvent local councils with the creation of development corporations such as those in Ebbsfleet and Welwyn Garden City. These act as the local planning authority for an area, separate from the existing local council. But a true solution to our housing problems requires a deeper national imagining, one that would allow for new small cities to be built with significant new infrastructure and serious thought put into attracting employment to them (or indeed to existing depressed towns and cities where cheaper housing market is already available and there is likely to be less opposition to new development).
The process of planning permission, which requires developers potentially to spend years and dizzying sums of money on consultants, research and the like, actually reinforces the proliferation of poor-quality development which contributes to NIMBYism. The difficulty in getting planning permission restricts the field of feasible housebuilders to those who can afford to wade through the mire of process, facilitating companies in building to standards convenient for them and sufficient to squeeze through local authorities, and no better. Proper reform of planning law which allows actual competition for building rights on the basis of quality development, rather than who can bear the brunt of procedural obstacle course, could over time lead to much improved urban landscapes and public infrastructure for all, taking oxygen from the fire of NIMBYism. Any movement serious about national development will simply have to face down the fury of anti-housing activists and their vassals in local councils.
There is no cut-and-dried solution to Britain’s local planning problem. Any direct moves by government must avoid the compulsive buck-passing and outsourcing of the public sector and the reflexive preference for governance and regulation as opposed to actual intervention. A loosening of building controls on the Green Belt would help too, and can conceivably be done without concreting over too much countryside and turning the Cotswolds into a car park. The more right-wing/liberal end of the “YIMBY” movement sees deregulation as the primary solution – but given the financial incentives of developers, it’s doubtful this would result in long-term improvement on anything except raw numbers of houses, many of questionable quality.
Housing obviously requires infrastructure, and as such housing can’t be separated from transport and energy policy. A project of economic development, expansion of the national public transport network, abundant and efficient nuclear energy and renewables where suitable, and large-scale housebuilding could well command the support of a huge chunk of the electorate. Promoting this project over the barriers distilled in the politics of local planning – judicialized politics, relations between the central and local state, the hollowness of parties and civil society groups – are key to the revitalisation popular sovereignty.
To develop and implement the nitty gritty of policy in any of these areas requires a mass political force to overcome the entrenched and powerful minority in nearly every locality in the land which would oppose it. The strange fusion of moralised political drama and technocracy in the local planning committee is where the need for such a movement is made clear.
The Northern Star 
Leave a reply to Anonymous Cancel reply