Response to government consultation: 'Planning for the Future'

Some of Cornwall’s residents are less likely to see plans on social media or digital platforms than through traditional methods. Currently planning applications are notified via Cornwall Council’s website (all digital), notices placed in the local newspaper, green notices placed on local lampposts and often as hard copies in the offices of parish and town councils.

• Action on Climate Change
• Action on regeneration of nature and biodiversity
• Affordability of rental and self-owned homes in Cornwall

LANDSCAPE

Cornwall has a distinct landscape in which small towns, villages, hamlets, farms and small holdings are scattered amongst the historic backdrop of mining and agriculture. The average size of a smallholder plot in Cornwall is 4 to 12 acres. This means Cornwall has scattered and continual habitation from the Tamar to Lands End.

It will be difficult and complex to assign zones in these historic and agricultural areas without damaging the viability and dynamism of Cornwall’s rural communities. The protections already afforded by the AONB and the World Heritage Site stifle development within these areas as homeowners and developers struggle to comply and afford the conditions tied to their planning applications. The nature of Cornwall’s built environment, which is scattered and diverse will require planning consideration on a site to site basis rather than a wholesale assignation of a ‘protection’ zone. Development must continue in rural areas and assigning areas throughout a multitude of small hamlets and villages will complicate not simplify the system. The current proposals do not clarify how rural areas can be zoned into growth, renewal or protection.
The government must also be mindful that areas of Cornwall are sparsely populated and not even represented by parish councils. Cornwall’s remote and smaller communities have parish meetings, not elected councillors. Consequently, over 50% of Cornwall’s communities do not have the resources to develop Neighbourhood Plans or be effectively included in Local Plans, leaving these villages and hamlets unprotected from excess and unwanted development.

ENVIRONMENT

The government’s descriptions of a new zonal planning system leave the environment unprotected. There is no clarity of detail as to whether the zones will undergo a full environmental assessment before being assigned as Growth, Renewal or Protected or whether there will be no assessment at all. The prime minister has even BOASTED there will be no more counting of newts!

Cornwall Green Party would like to see more detailed environmental assessment and absolutely zero ‘offsetting’ of biodiversity obligations in the government’s planning reforms. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world and there is no mention in these planning proposals of policies and strategies to safeguard the UK’s diminished populations of flora and fauna, nor are there any details to show intent to increase or recover biodiversity and the abundance of wildlife populations.
The government’s white paper does not mention the inclusion of a zone for a nature recovery network, which is one of its flagship policies. There is no indication how the nature recovery network, currently being developed at a local level, will feed into the proposed system of zones.
Cornwall Green Party welcomes the intention to have detailed national mapping of land, land use and nature which will be available online to everyone. However, this data should be informed by local knowledge and linked to the Land Registry as land ownership is. Cornish residents and potential buyers should be able to see who is benefiting from the huge uplift in land values in Cornwall once land is assigned for growth. This is especially important as land currently assigned for development in Cornwall is often owned by overseas companies and individuals.

DEMOCRACY

Cornwall Green Party has concerns that the government’s proposals will dilute democracy and ride roughshod over the hard work already undertaken to produce Local and Neighbourhood Plans.

Cornwall Council is in the process of updating its Local Plan with a DPD for the climate emergency. The policies in this document aim to support the county’s ambition to be net zero carbon by 2030 through local planning policy. This includes One Planet policies which allow people to build a property and inhabit land on which they subsist. It includes policies to enable renewable energy production and future mining extraction. These policies are the result of an ambitious consultation process which was supported by organisations and individuals throughout Cornwall helping to influence and design the final draft. It is unsatisfactory to see this document and all this hard work abandoned for the government to pursue a new NPPF around which this document has not been framed. The government must recognise that the imposition of a zonal system without the detail of how current local policies and plans will be respected is undemocratic. And the current white paper does not contain any detail on whether policies for the climate and ecological emergency will be in included – a sad omission.

It is also unclear from the government’s proposals how future local and neighbourhood plans will be resourced so they can be completed within 30 months. This timeframe is short and local authorities, especially parish and town councils, will need access to professional support if these plans are to be meaningful. This will require finance for the training of existing officers and parish clerks as well as the contracting of consultants.

Once again there is a lack of detail in the white paper on this issue and it is not clear as to how the national general development policies will work in reality.

Nevertheless designating land as a ‘growth’ zone will curtail the input of elected representatives in the planning process. Transferring local plan development to professional officers will again undermine the democratic process; local authority officers are not accountable to the public.

Given the differing economies, environments, and demographics of different local authorities, there should be more democratic input at the local level, not less. It is not clear how Cornwall Council will be able to set policies which respond to local priorities in the proposed system. Any problems of cronyism, delays, and apparent unfairness are alleviated by increasing transparency and accountability, not by removing decision making.

Cornwall Council has suffered from national planning inspectors overruling its housing targets revising these upwards to 52,000 from an initial target of 38,000 set by the Council’s Planning Policy Advisory Panel for the 2020-30 period. This number includes an assumption that 7% of these homes will be holiday lets/second homes. The growth of second homes and holiday lets is hollowing out many local communities and doing nothing to help provide affordable housing for people who need it in Cornwall. Councils need stronger powers to set local ordinances and/or differential council tax levels that can help to prevent this sort of development.

There is a risk that such a test could be set up in a flawed way from the start, meaning that using it as the single measure for all planning applications would ensure that every decision is more or less a "bad" one. Environmental considerations need more than just the council surveying people who happen to be walking past the area on any given day, soil and water tests and so forth being carried out and scientific data being taken into consideration.



“Affordable” rent is currently defined by the Department of Communities and Local Government as rents at less than 25% of gross household income. By that definition it is very hard to find affordable rental property in Cornwall, where median gross household income is around £22,000. So to be affordable rent must be less than £5,500 a year, or £458 a month. But it is also defined by government and Cornwall Council as “up to 80% of open market rent”. Market rents in Cornwall average £625 a month, which means that an “affordable rent” could be as much as £500 a month. So by the 80% definition, more than half of Cornish households are unable to afford “affordable rent”.

Note that “social rent” is based on a different formula that combines local wages and local property values, and typically sees rents set at around 50% of private rents in the same area. But few homes for social rent are being built.

In 2018, homes for social rent made up just 5% of all new “affordable housing” in Cornwall (i.e. those built from 2010). The number of social homes being built had plummeted from 423 in 2011/12 to just 74 in 2018. This is largely due to the relationship between Cornwall Council and private developers.

Now developers are encouraged to build ‘starter homes’ of up to £250,000, to be sold at a 20% discount to make then “affordable” to buy. But for most households in Cornwall these homes are completely unaffordable even after this discount. According to the DCLG, a house is “affordable” to buy if it costs no more than 3.5 times gross household income. That means the median household in Cornwall can actually afford a house of up to £77,000.

Even when developers agree to provide a certain proportion of “affordable” housing. They often renege on these agreements and end up providing much less.

Key points

i. Major simplification of land use planning is likely to lead to:

• key decisions being made without proper understanding of the bigger picture and locally relevant issues
• ignoring important issues such as environmental protection, climate mitigation, local vernacular design and cultural relevance
• lower-level staff making key decisions
• local annoyance at poor council decision making reduced local democracy

ii. Reducing land use decision making to three zones means that:

• Growth areas developers will concentrate on pushing low quality, standard, locally alien developments onto areas which will have no power to resist
• this approach to development will alienate local communities and reduce their quality of life
• such hostility will not increase the number or range of new homes built

iii. The urgent need for climate action in not recognised in the process or apparent policies outlined.

The science and UK legislation is clear that the UK has to reduce our emissions dramatically starting now and continuing each year at a minimum of 4% reduction or over 16 million tonnes p/a CO2e.

If the government is serious about meeting its legal requirement to reach carbon zero by 2050 then house building has to play a significant part in this.

a. Homes must be zero carbon from now on to meet legal targets for zero carbon.

• The suggestion in the consultation that homes could be reduced in carbon emissions by 80% by 2025 does not meet the legislative commitment to the UK being net zero by 2050, as once built it is hard and expensive to make fabric changes to buildings.
• After ten years of development the zero carbon homes standard was ready to go in early 2016, until the new government of 2015 pulled this development.
• Therefore there is no reason why, some five years later, all new homes should not be zero carbon from 2021.

We propose net zero now to save carbon emissions quicker and much more cheaply

b. The existing duty to meet the Climate Change Act requirements through plan-making under several planning acts must be made explicit rather than implicit.

This should build upon the existing legal duty and should apply to both development planning and decision making and should include explicit reference to implementing the carbon reduction budgets required by the 2008 Climate Act as amended. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act (section 19) and the NPPF (Paragraph 148) require Local Plans to achieve radical carbon emission reductions in line with the Climate Change Act (upgraded to a -100% requirement by 2050). This must be made much clearer to all involved in the planning system

c. Changing the planning system to speed up new homes delivery is tackling the wrong part of the system

All the evidence and analysis from knowledgeable parties such as the Local Government Association, the MHCLG’s own figures and others show that the blockage in housing delivery is not the planning system. It is housebuilders which do not build when they have planning.

Housebuilders have the requirement to maximise shareholder value and directors’ salaries and hence will hold a land bank to increase their asset valuations, and build in small numbers in each area in order to keep demand high and supply small, so minimising the potential for house prices to reduce.

Recent government figures show that nine in ten applications are approved by councils with more than a million homes given planning permission over the last decade yet to be built.  It is time that the government produced papers on policy which are evidenced based.



Note on Energy hierarchy

The consultation document states that the Energy Hierarchy should be followed. However, the main determinant of energy use around housing is its location and relationship to public and active transport infrastructure and to local services.

Therefore the first step in the Energy Hierarchy must be the location of new developments in relation to transport.

This leads to the requirement to plan low energy transport infrastructure in advance of new building developments.

An analysis of the carbon footprints of several Cornish communities provides strong evidence for the importance of location vs transport needs as shown in the table below.

Delays in the planning system, in the experience of Cornwall Green Party elected councillors, are usually the result of actions by developers; where delays originate in the planning system there are usually good reasons for these.

At root, the current planning system is democratic and in fact and in practice it is open for community engagement. In view of these factors, the decision-making process is remarkably quick, though it may suit the property development industry to argue otherwise.

In the experience of Cornwall Green Party’s elected councillors and volunteers, there has been an underestimation of the scale, complexity and time needed to produce a Neighbourhood Plan, with volunteers trying to make sense of jargon, policies and regulations. In a region like Cornwall, which is less affluent than most other areas in the UK, many residents do not have the time or inclination to enter the Neighbourhood Planning process. The volunteers who do come forward are in most cases retired or elderly and this is not a representative slice of the local demography.

Once a plan reaches the referendum stage, on average a ‘yes’ vote is 88% but on a turnout of 32%. Therefore, do Neighbourhood Plans adequately reflect the wishes of the whole community when the majority do not vote? Do NPs need reform? And if so the government needs to address public apathy. Is this a failure of communication, the complexity of the planning system or the lack of strong opinions which prevents residents voting or becoming involved?

The fact is that the predominant factor in delays to build out is that developers are sitting on the added value that a planning approval brings and speculating on a future rise in value. This can only be prevented by penalties for doing so: shortening the start time requirement (to say one year) before an approval lapses. But also preventing developers from making a sham start such as laying a drain or even just turning a turf, in order to avoid the expiry of an approval.

It is far from obvious what penalties might be levied against developers for tardiness in build out. Legislation would certainly be required but clearly Planning For The Future will , in any case, bring major changes requiring legislation.

In Liskeard, for example, there is currently a development which is stalled by the developer and has been simply abandoned in its half-complete state as a fenced off site. There is a road and two public footpaths that run through the site and are currently inaccessible to the public. The footpaths form the only pedestrian route between a large housing area and a primary school. The action by the developer is causing genuine difficulty to the community. This delay in build-out is having a negative impact on the infrastructure and it is unlikely that this is an unusual case.