Planning is the answer, but what was the question?
‘The Future of Planning’ / Part 2
In the UK, we tend to think of the planning system as beginning in 1947, with the Town and Country Planning Act, implemented by Attlee’s post-war Labour government. But its origins actually go back even further than that, through Abercrombie’s plan for London, Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities movement, and especially to the Public Health Act of 1848, which was a response to the ad hoc urban development without proper sanitation that had led to outbreaks of cholera. (This link between planning and public health is a theme I’ll come back to later in this series)
Nonetheless, it is not unfair to say that the 1947 Act laid down the main foundations for the planning system as we would recognise it today.
If you distill it down, that planning system really has three core functions:
1. Strategic coordination of development
To make sure that the use and development of land is coordinated, and consistent with the public interest. This involves a lot of communication and knowledge-work: design, extensive evidence and expert assessment, weighing the social, economic and environmental parameters, benefits and harms. It’s also about making sure we plan ahead to make sure there is sufficient water, energy, education and other infrastructure capacity.
2. Capture land value uplift
When we grant planning permission for a piece of land to be used for housing, its value instantly explodes from a few thousand pounds per hectare to potentially many millions of pounds per hectare. This is called ‘planning uplift’.
That value doesn’t just come from nowhere though. It is essentially the stored-up value that results from a long, slow value-creation process that begins with planning and investing-into utilities, roads, parks, GPs, schools and transport infrastructure, and the community activity that makes a location desirable to people and businesses.
In a fair and functioning planning system, most of this uplift would be captured by the public or the community to pay for the infrastructure that creates that location value in the first place. That would create better places, grow the economy, increase support for development, and break the cycle of underinvestment in ‘left-behind’ places.
Unfortunately, the mechanisms we have for doing this in the current planning system aren’t really working very well, to put it mildly. (One of the posts in this series will explore some of the ways we can fix this.)
3. Democratic consent
The third function of the planning system in democratic societies is as the mechanism through which, as communities, we grant our collective consent for development. In other words, it has a function that is really nothing at all to do with evidence, it is entirely about political support, and the balance of competing interests.
The strange thing is that even though this democratic dimension is structured-into the planning system (in the form of public consultations and planning committees), we often shy away from it. We try to hide it.
For example, when a large-scale development is proposed, local communities will often acquire a sudden interest in rare newts. Of course, in general, everyone is concerned with protecting wildlife, but the level of attention you’re likely to give it depends on your incentives. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that the discovery of many of these newts is no accident. They are being used as a (perhaps necessary, and justified) tool to fight back against proposals over which communities feel have no other power. The real underlying issue is that people don’t see development as benefiting them or improving the place where they live. Or indeed, nature as a whole. What they see is ugly, poorly-designed development, with housing tenures many people can’t afford, very few trees or natural habitats, not supported by schools, GPs or public transport – yet nonetheless it still yields large profits to developers or land speculators. This, understandably, makes people angry. Most communities don’t have the resources to pay for consultants, so they feel entirely justified in using every lever that they can — and sometimes that lever is newt-shaped.
The result is an acrimonious public discourse where no one is really arguing in good faith, and trust is broken on all sides. Where we spend hundreds of hours (and thousands of pounds) arguing over the minutiae of evidence, when in the end we all know it’s really a political decision.
You will often hear frustrated local businesses, developers and those who want to see more development accuse communities of ‘NIMBY’-ism for objecting to development, and arguing that we should override democracy (‘be more like China’) in order to get more homes built and grow the economy. It’s a tempting idea.
But in doing so, they are overlooking two things.
First, that this democratic-consent function of the planning system is actually quite a good safety mechanism. It’s like a health-test of our economy and institutions — an indicator of political legitimacy. If you’re having to override it, it’s probably a sign that something deeper in the system is broken. We ignore that thing at our peril.
Second, we don’t actually have to. When you spend time speaking to people, you realise there are some really straightforward ways that, by redesigning how the planning system works, we can mend some of the broken incentives behind the problem, and unlock much more support for development. (Again, I’ll come back to this in the coming posts).
So far, I’ve touched on some the ways that the planning system isn’t working, and admittedly that might seem a bit depressing. But by thinking about the system from first principles like this, and by acknowledging the problems honestly, we can begin to ask ourselves a much more positive question: how could it work better?
If we were to redesign the planning system today, based on the original principles, but with 21st century technology and ways of working in mind — how would we design it differently?
It might be that, 80 years after it was created, we can evolve towards a system that works better for everyone. We can realise the original ambitions of the 1947 Act in ways that even its creators would not have dared to think possible.
This is Part 2 of a series called ‘The Future of Planning’. The first part is here.
The title of this post is, of course, shamelessly stolen and adapted from Cedric Price.
