Why hurry with a Local Plan when Pennycook will make the difficult decisions for you?

Councillors can be absolute snails over Local Plans, the Government is sure the new NPPF will change that.  They are wrong, unfortunately.

Under the new system, a Local Plan should be prepared and adopted within 30 months of Gateway 1, Councils must start preparing their next plan within five years and the Secretary of State can intervene where progress is inadequate.

But why would a Councillor want to hurry?

Voting for a Local Plan means voting to allocate actual fields, in actual villages, represented by actual Councillors who would really, really, like to be re-elected.  No one wants an enemy in the Parish Council, if you want to be a councillor 4 years from now.

Moving quickly therefore means making the poisonous decisions yourself. Moving slowly means that Matthew Pennycook, Angela Rayner or a Planning Inspector will make them for you.

So far, it’s just Three Rivers, where the Council produced a plan which Pennycook considered it had left out suitable housing sites. He then directed the Council to add six named sites, plus a seventh if its lease problems could be resolved, increasing the plan up to approximately 85% of housing need.

From the Government’s point of view, this was a punishment.

From a Councillor’s point of view, Pennycook had just taken personal responsibility for allocating six toxic housing sites. Every pissy resident is now met with a chorus of “blame Pennycook!”

London is taking the same argument to a much bigger stage. The draft London Plan provides for around 558,000 homes over ten years when assessed need is about 850,000. It has firm housing targets for only ten years when the new NPPF requires a Spatial Development Strategy covering at least 25 years.

The NPPF also says that failing to meet assessed need should be exceptional and requires evidence of stringent efforts to accommodate the missing homes through cooperation with neighbouring authorities. I haven’t noticed Surrey, Kent, Hertfordshire or Essex volunteering to take London’s missing 290,000 homes.

The London Plan has not been examined yet, but it is difficult to see how it complies with the new NPPF in its current form and Sadiq Khan is daring the Government to do something about it.

If the Plan is accepted, he has “protected” London from a much larger housing target. If it is rejected or changed, the Government and the Inspectors own the extra homes and the unpleasant Green Belt decisions. Politically, that is a pretty good bet for Lord Khan.

Buckinghamshire is being slightly more subtle.

Pennycook intervened in February after the Council had spent six years failing to produce a countywide plan. Buckinghamshire has now published one which meets its housing number on paper, providing for 91,287 homes against an assessed need of 91,230.

However, it does so without ordinary housing allocations in the Green Belt, puts nine of its ten strategic growth locations in the former Aylesbury Vale area and uses a stepped housing requirement of only 2,150 homes a year before 2030, followed by a jump to 5,222 a year afterwards…  The mind boggles.

So, the Conservative south is protected, the growth goes to Lib-Dem wards in the north and the local plan is possibly compliant and also certainly nonsense.

If the Inspector accepts it, the Council has done very well. If the Inspector demands different sites, Green Belt releases or a more believable delivery programme, those become the Inspector’s decisions. Again, Councillors get someone else to carry the political blame.

The new NPPF may make planning officers work more quickly, but Councillors we speak with every day see far less reason to rush. They can still resist through the sites they select, the areas they protect, the delivery they postpone and, occasionally, by waiting for the Government to intervene.

For site promoters, there is a secret.  You don’t want to be the last sites selected, by either side.

Being added later by Pennycook or an Inspector might produce an allocation on a marginal site, but it also makes your site the political football which local Councillors can publicly oppose at every later stage of planning.

Get onto the Council’s team sheet before it hands the whole match over to Whitehall.