This letter is the formal response of the Campaign to Protect Rural England Sussex Branch CIO (CPRE Sussex) to the Department for Communities and Local Government’s public consultation on the Proposed Changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF.)
CPRE Sussex works to promote the beauty, tranquillity and diversity of the Sussex Countryside by encouraging the sustainable use of land and other natural resources in town and country. We encourage appropriate and sustainable land use, farming, woodland and biodiversity policies and practice to improve the well-being of rural communities. It is our position that local planning authorities should seek to ensure that the negative impacts of development on the countryside, both direct and indirect, are kept to a minimum and that development is sustainable in accordance with national planning policy. Our response is as follows:
Q1 Change in definition of affordable housing.
We do not support the inclusion of an alternative model for intermediate housing, to replace the failed shared equity model (rendered non-viable in this area by the shift from social to affordable rents).
The proposed 20% discount model is much more profitable to builders and developers than provision of new social rented housing, so given the chance builders and developers will switch “en masse” away from social rented housing to the 20% discount model. This would simply advantage one group of people with housing issues at the expense of another, much poorer, group. This would not be equitable or effective.
The 20% discount model also offers the potential for gaming by builders, developers and others.
- Game 1: Who is to set the price to which the discount is applied? If left to house-builders, they will seek to game this to their advantage.
- Game 2: Who is to determine who the beneficiaries are to be? Since the new discounted model involves, effectively, a gift to recipients of up to £50K (£90K in London) there needs to be careful control against corruption in the identification of the recipients.
Q3 Definition of a commuter hub
We support the principle here, but the definition is excessively wide and could include, for example, any rural railway station. Residents of houses built close to such a station will be as car-dependent as any other rural residents, as it is extremely unlikely that the railway will take them to all or even any of the schools, surgeries, shops, services and employment that they need to access. A more careful definition that takes rural locations into account is essential.
Q6 Should LPAs be forced to plan for new settlements?
No. It should be left to the discretion of LPAs, who understand local situations, to determine whether or not new settlements are an appropriate solution in their areas. CPRE is aware of examples in Sussex of intense and aggressive lobbying activity from developers motivated solely by the prospect of windfall profits seeking to impose inherently unsustainable new dormitory settlements at entirely unsuitable countryside locations (e.g Mayfields, the Eton College proposals for Plumpton Green). They should not be encouraged.
Q8 [also Q7] Encouraging development of brownfield sites.
These questions mis-diagnose the problem. The main reason that brownfield sites come forward too slowly is nothing to do with blockages from the planning system. The reason is that house-builders prefer, and developers greatly prefer lower-risk and more profitable greenfield options. The more greenfield land is made available, the less brownfield land will be used.
In Sussex CPRE is aware of highly sustainable brownfield sites with planning permission that have laid idle for years simply because the landowners (in one prominent case the bank RBS) believe it to be more profitable to wait until the price rises than to sell at the market price available. At a village level a landowner who chose to keep two attractive rural cottages empty and derelict for 30 years has done far better from the notional increase in site value (tax free) than they would have done by making them available for housing.
The planning system is not responsible for this. The best way to encourage brownfield development would be to impose council tax or a penal charge or compulsory purchase at existing use value on brownfield sites allocated by an LPA or Neighbourhood Plan for residential use but remained undeveloped.
Q9 Definition of a small site
A site for 10 units is a small site in an urban area but much more significant in a small village. The law of unintended consequences needs to be taken into account. If any arbitrary limit is set, developers will seek to set their plot beneath it. For example, while Lewes District had a threshold for affordable housing of 15 units, there were astonishing regular applications for 14 units on sites that could have accommodated more. If you were a developer with a site that could take 14 small units (which at 40% affordable would be 9 market units and 5 affordables), would you apply for 14, or instead for 10 larger units, 100% market? Introduction of any arbitrary unit-number cut-off will distort the market away from the new small units, for which there is the highest demand, towards large market units.
Q10 Special policies for small sites.
Our main view re the threshold issue we would address under Q9 above – and that in a rural village 10 units is a big development. LPAs do not discriminate against small scale applications, in our experience, and Neighbourhood Plans almost invariably favour them.
Q11 [also Q12] Housing delivery test
LPAs are responsible for allocating sufficient sites for the new housing required. Delivering the housing is the responsibility of the house-building industry, which is of course required by law to act in the interests of its shareholders, not in the interests of the public. LPAs have no current tools to force the house-building industry to deliver more housing than it wishes to deliver. Forcing the LPAs to release more greenfield sites if house-builders under-deliver, as seems to be what is being proposed, would be (a) ineffective in delivering more housing; and (b) would result in a shift from delivery on (mainly sustainable urban) brownfield to (mainly unsustainable rural) greenfield. This would seem a good idea only to a lobbyist for the strategic land industry, lobbying for the residential development of unsuitable (but more profitable to them) countryside sites.
As an example of house-builders blocking housing delivery by holding excessive land banks:
From the 2015 annual report of M.J. Gleeson, and the AGM statement published 11 Dec 2015 and available online. Gleeson Homes, which specialises in the delivery of housing on brownfield sites, reports proudly that it has a strong land supply of sites with PP for over 7,700 units. Its planned delivery rate is approx 800 units/year - so almost a decade's worth of banked sites. Its subsidiary Gleeson Strategic Land specialises in obtaining planning permission for unsustainable greenfield sites in the countryside, on the basis (we have heard the same hypocritical arguments delivered with a straight face in almost every Sussex LPA local plan examination) that more housing is urgently needed and that it is the planning system that is the blockage to delivery.
http://mj.gleeson-homes.co.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Gleeson-AGM-Statement-11-December-20151.pdf (synopsis)
Supportive evidence is also available for the focus of the mega-housebuilders and the government on large housing sites (illustrated here by the developer-driven emphasis on new settlements) being an important contributor to slow delivery. These very large developments are very complex and frequently attract strong opposition, so are very frequently delayed, and not infrequently fail. Think third SE runway. Smaller projects have much higher levels of acceptability and are capable of rapid progression. Supportive evidence from Nexus Planning is quoted in the 18 Dec 2015 issue of Planning magazine, p.6. They showed that the LPAs most likely to under-deliver new housing are those that are over-reliant on a small number of large sites. Virtually every Neighbourhood Plan to date has demonstrated that there is much more public support (and much less organised opposition) for the delivery of multiple small sites, especially in rural areas. Our own Neighbourhood Plan experience is that small sites attract little opposition and can be delivered promptly, while large projects in the same village can be pursued for decades without any positive outcome.
To understand this one only has to consider the calculations a housebuilder must make. Survival alone dictates giving high priority to the avoidance of over-supply at the point of sale. Running into situations such as those experienced in Spain and Ireland a few years ago is catastrophic. Thus in committing to a project a housebuilder must be confident that at the point of delivery there will be a sufficient number of buyers ready and able to purchase. A small scheme of, say, 30 units can be built and marketed within a year, and a housebuilder today might well feel confident that such conditions would apply one year ahead (despite worrying suggestions from the Governor of the Bank of England that interest rates might be heading upwards by then, a statement correlating with a dip in housing starts in the second half of 2015). A larger scheme of, say, 200 units requires a crystal ball able to see 3-4 years ahead. A mega-project such as a new settlement taking a decade or more is very likely to run into choppy waters, and has a fair risk of encountering a hurricane. Such mega-projects are very popular with strategic land companies and their lobbyists, but their profits only require planning permission, not actual housing delivery.
Q13 Using employment allocations for housing
Any policy such as that considered here would be subject to gaming. As a country (and as a rural economy) we need employment sites, but it will almost always be in the landowner’s financial interest to divert employment land to residential development. This has been evident in Sussex where there are multiple examples of landowners with occupied and viable former-agricultural buildings converted to employment use using the provisions of NPPF para.55 to get rid of their business tenants in order to convert their buildings to residential use. It is in practice very easy to get rid of a business tenant and ensure the property remains unlet – just market at a high rent and with unfriendly vibes. The policy proposed would reduce employment opportunities in the countryside, convert viable rural communities to dormitories and increase unsustainable commuting.
Q17 [also Q15] Starter homes on rural exception sites.
This policy depends entirely on the goodwill of the landowner, who provides the site at a very low cost. Would any landowner with options be willing to donate land for exception sites that they could sell for development? Only a saint! Most landowners certainly would not – indeed the very long lease granted to the HA that manages the affordable housing contains a “poison-pill” clause to ensure that the landowner would profit should the exception site houses ever be sold onto the normal market.
Similarly neither landowners nor local communities will have the slightest interest in delivering exception sites unless there is a strong local connection test.
Unless there are more saints about than we have heretofore encountered, this policy would result in the unintended outcome of land for exception sites becoming impossible (rather than merely difficult) to find.
Q18 Other approaches to delivering starter homes in rural areas
Through a community land trust run by the community providing housing for the local community in which the benefit was not restricted to the first occupier but retained in perpetuity.
Q19, Q20 Starter homes in the Green Belt
No green belt in Sussex.
Q21 Transitional arrangements
No view.
Q22 Assumptions and Data Sources
See answers to Q8 & Q11 above. The proposals seem to have accepted the self-interested lobbying from strategic land and house-building interests that the blockage to delivery of new housing is the planning system, and that the solution is to relax planning laws. One only has to look at ex-urban America or France to see what a bad idea that would be in this small but often still-beautiful country. Much of the dissatisfaction with current housing arises from other social policy rather than an actual shortage of housing. The UK has quite enough bedrooms for all its inhabitants; they just are not distributed very fairly. As social inequalities grow, so house-ownership patterns will inevitably change. Many discontented families actually have a perfectly suitable house; it is just that they would prefer to own rather than rent it, would rather pay less rent, or (entirely understandably) are concerned about insecure tenure. There is no point in building additional houses in the Sussex countryside if they just become weekend homes to wealthy Londoners (who can afford them and can outbid homeless or insecurely-housed locals).
Yours faithfully
David Johnson
Chairman
