“our new National Planning Policy Framework….affirms the vital importance of planning, the central role of planning professionals in shaping our communities anew, and the route to many more, and more beautiful, homes through a plan-led system”
Rt Hon Michael Gove MP Secretary of State speech to RIBA, 19 December 2023
“The plan making system is the right way to plan for growth and environmental enhancement, ensuring local leaders and their communities come together to agree on the future of their areas”
Rt Hon Angela Rayner MP Secretary of State statement to House of Commons, 30 July 2024
There’s not much people seem to agree about when it comes to the planning system these days but the importance of the development plan is an exception.
Politicians, developers, environmental and community groups are just about all in favour of the “plan-led” system. Today’s debate is largely about the scope of development plans and how they are produced rather than the importance attached to plans when planning decisions are made.
Twas not ever thus. Doyens of planning history will recall that planning law has been much less emphatic about the status of development plans. Section 70 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 required the local planning authority merely to “have regard” to the provisions of the development plan in so far as they are material to a planning application and to any other material considerations. As Circular (remember them?) 14/85 put it “the Development Plan is one, but only one, of the material considerations”. As we know there can be multiple material considerations for each and every planning application. Why should professionals, politicians and communities invest so much time and effort into producing a development plan if it just one consideration among many.
It was into this fray that the Government published legislation in November 1990 that was to become the Planning and Compensation Act 1991. This was the same month that John Major became Prime Minister and Margaret Thatcher and Nicholas Ridley moved on. Michael Heseltine took up the reins at the Department of the Environment with Sir George Young as Planning Minister.
The Bill was modest in its original ambition: strengthening enforcement; controlling demolition; and introducing controls to address twin-tracking among other measures.
Riding a new wave of environmental thinking and fresh from winning major battles over out-of-town shopping centres, speculative new settlements and Green Belt threats the Bill became of focus for CPRE campaigners. An effective alliance with the Labour frontbench and Tory peers and backbenchers saw CPRE tabling over 100 amendments. None turned out to be more important than the multiple efforts to create a legally binding plan-led system.
Starting in the House of Lords CPRE’s drafting tried multiple permutations. Their Lordships were asked to accept the development plan as the “primary consideration” or the “first consideration” or alternatively to accept a “presumption in favour of the development plan”. At each step Government Ministers resisted and amendments were withdrawn. Yet the arguments against change became progressively weaker and the Bill moved into the Commons.
At Second Reading Sir George Young acknowledged “we want the system to be plan-led….. We want the district plan to be the indicator—the signal—of what is permitted development and the market must respond to the local plan” but there was still no sign of the Bill being changed. Something was needed to push it over the line.
Enter the humble hedgerow. CPRE had been pushing amendments to introduce the first ever legal protection for hedgerows. This followed Government commitments in the first Environment White Paper in response to evidence that England had lost more than half its hedgerows since 1950. In a rare departure from normal Parliamentary protocol an amendment was won on a vote during the Bill’s Committee stage and by the time it came back to the floor of the Commons the political groundswell of support had grown into something approaching a tidal wave.
A Government with a slim majority faced the genuine risk of losing a vote to delete the newly won hedgerow protections – a measure it had itself said it wanted to see introduced. The “usual channels” of behind the scene negotiation kicked in and the parties agreed to support the creation of a plan-led system if there was some back-pedalling on the hedgerow amendment.
In the coded language of Parliament, Labour’s Shadow Planning Minister Clive Soley MP said on 16 May 1991 “I am pleased that the Government have said that, following discussion between spokesmen from the two main parties this afternoon, the Government are to concede to us…” Sure enough Sir George Young accepted the need for a change – “This is not the first time that we have debated the significance and status of the development plan in considering planning applications. I recognise the concern that has been expressed. It may not be enough for us to use non-statutory guidance to emphasise that we are operating a plan-led system. Given the procedures that have to be gone through to prepare, to consult and to secure agreement for a district plan, I understand the force of the argument that we have heard this evening that the plan should be the starting point or the first consideration when one looks at the planning application. I therefore propose to concede….”
The principle of the plan-led system was established although the detail had to wait for some expert drafting in a Government amendment.
The end result was that on 19 June 1991 the Government tabled new Clause 20 stating the now familiar:
“54A. Where, in making any determination under the planning Acts, regard is to be had to the development plan, the determination shall be made in accordance with the plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise”
The debate lasted just five minutes and the plan-led system was born.
It is clear that the job of creating an effective plan-led system isn’t finished. While it has been helped by the creation of a community-led as well as local authority-led development plan in the form of neighbourhood planning this has often been met with resistance. The process of preparing Local Plans remains too complex and too arcane for most and shuts out too many people. Too many planning decisions still appear to put planning policy considerations to one side too easily and development plans lack the bite that would be provided by a community right of appeal when planning applications are approved despite clear conflict with an agreed development plan.
Yet imagine the last 30+ years of chaos if we had been planning without plans that mattered. As Sir George Young said at the time the plan-led system was created “no less a body than the Council for the Protection of Rural England hailed it as a ‘historic promise’, strengthening ‘the whole basis of the planning system’ and moving forward to a ‘new era’”. The debate over planning continues but the certainty of the plan-led era is here to stay. Where would we be without it? Let’s take a moment to thank the humble hedgerow for saving the planning system.
Tony Burton CBE works freelance on community, planning and land use issues. He was responsible for tabling the amendments to the Planning and Compensation Bill when working at CPRE. He is now a trustee of CPRE and Nationwide Foundation and chairs Power to Change.
@Tony4Place
tony@tonyburton.org.uk