The government appears likely to be about to drop its binding housing targets and its proposals to separate areas into different zones of development, amongst a number of measures being reconsidered by new secretary of state Michael Gove. 

But NLA Sounding Board members suggested that there should be stress tests for deliverability, better, more available data on housing and other needs and a recognition that perhaps ‘generic’ design codes may be more suited to the rest of the country than a capital city where architectural and masterplanning standards are higher.

The news emerged last week from Argent’s Robert Evans as he chaired the NLA Sounding Board, which this time focused on what the industry could do to raise its collective voice and be heard in general and on the matter of planning reform – should they in fact be necessary.

The plans, part of government’s Planning for the Future document, were to have separated borough land into growth, renewal and protection zones – but it is believed that they have proved unpopular, not least with MPs, and will be shelved. The NLA Sounding Board heard that perhaps instead there should be more of presumption in favour of local plans, with the emphasis moved – as suggested by former planning inspector Steve Quartermain – to proving why they should not be accepted as sound, rather than why they should. This might help to ‘reinvigorate placemaking’, said Evans. Knight Frank’s Stuart Baillie welcomed the news on planning zones being ‘kicked into touch’ as he felt it would have ‘stifled creativity’ but that we should look to brownfield sites, housing zones and opportunity areas in a bid to speed up the planning process.

LSE’s Tony Travers said it was clear from the Chesham and Amersham by-election that the government did not want to radically change the planning system, but that it begs the question of ‘how London fits into its new version of the South’ – or whether it is seen as an area that needs new housing, like the Midlands and the North. Enfield’s Sarah Cary said that while the idea of zoning ‘might have come off the table’, a different approach to plan-making should be something ‘we should all be continuing to promote and think about’. 

But we should go back to first principles, suggested Westminster’s Deirdra Armsby and not assume that we need reform in the way that it has been portrayed, which has led to ‘an array of jumbled processes’, with speed at its heart. Really the issue is one of funding, however, she said, and that the system is not resourced properly, nor is it really equipped to deal with myriad sustainability challenges. Other elements could include reintroducing more local thinking in the planning system, revisiting permitted development rights, and thinking about how 20-minute neighbourhoods can best be implemented. 

Toby Courtauld of Great Portland Estates said that the resourcing question had been one that developers like his own company had struggled with, and that every year since perhaps 20 years ago the system had become more complex, complicated, and generally more difficult to navigate through – and therefore more expensive. ‘Maybe it’s time to remember that, actually, more complexity is not good’, he said. ‘It makes it much more difficult’.

Design codes, said Manisha Patel of PRP, which is involved in one of the government’s pilot boroughs, had been ‘quite beneficial’ in terms of the way stakeholders can work together. But they should not be too prescriptive, should leave flexibility for change and the quality of architecture will be ‘challenging’ in more of the affordable housing areas, she added, while more should be done on non-housing elements. But how do we assess the quality of design codes, asked Allies and Morrison’s Bob Allies. ‘The generic way one talks about or codes a place do not in any way, it seems to me, necessarily produce a successful place’, he said. ‘I think that’s the fundamental problem’.

Much of this, said Central’s Pat Brown, goes full circle to the New London Agenda, which NLA curator-in-chief Peter Murray had outlined as the next step of research for the organisation, and which over the next 21 months aims to raise the profile of the sector and set up a dialogue with City Hall, segueing with Brown’s organisation and ‘London 3.0’ work. NLA will use its ‘amazing firepower’, said Murray, to look at key lines of enquiry around issues including healthcare, planning, the future of work, housing, wellbeing, technical competency, tall buildings and transport, supported by the Sounding Board and its expert panels, with a report and exhibition as a result. The way in which the city keeps employment up and attracts new talent is absolutely essential, said Courtauld, and was in his experience what politicians focus on – so should also be part of this new agenda. Whatever themes are agreed on, however, they should be stress tested for deliverability, said ODPC’s William McKee. ‘Because, if they’re not deliverable, they are a Utopian dream.’ Governance was another important element, not least because of the levelling up agenda, he said, TfL’s Ben Plowden adding that there was room for looking at time, and the industry’s ability to take urgent actions for the long term. Stuart Baillie suggested questioning why projects are not getting delivered or are taking so long to do so, not least because the pipeline of tall buildings continues to rise, but delivery is dropping off. And Pocket’s Marc Vlessing pointed to another theme that needed ‘dampening’, revealing that a study it did with FTI on 1000 plus consumers in London between the ages of 20 and 45 to measure whether there was appetite from them for wanting to leave the city post-Covid, but could not see any discernible pattern that it had grown. ‘What was really interesting was the percentage of younger people saying that they desperately wanted to stay in the city which had increased over the last two years’, Vlessing said. ‘And the main reasons were that they've been living with their parents for up to two years.’ But the ‘indifference’ or sheer lack of funding from central government for London was another topic worth noting, and as part of the levelling up agenda ‘should be a real concern for all of us’.

The NLA Sounding Board also heard from Jaffer Muljiani, reporting back from the Next Gen version, who suggested that political cycles tend to be too short term to enact real effective change, especially in sectors like housing, ‘rather than continuously chasing the next quarter results’. He added that there are still no fixed targets or metrics and that social value was hard to quantify and measure; that the industry should not shy away from talking about the money angle on development, and that more knowledge-sharing across the industry could benefit everyone.