The Construction Industry Council (CIC), in its response to the government’s consultation on the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), said that it supported the aims but come of the details fall short.
The government wants to get more houses built every year and is proposing to relax planning constraints to help make it happen.
The CIC – an umbrella body representing several professional institutions and research organisations – has told the government in its seven-page response to the NPPF consultation: “Our main concern on our initial reading is that, whilst being gratified that the government is endorsing the role of planning and of local plans, we have reservations that without greater resource the ambitions set out by government to deliver new homes by amending the planning process will not deliver. We also think it important to underline the need for high quality development, and to ensure that we strive for excellent sustainable placemaking.
“We are concerned that some of what government is proposing risks undermining these important objectives. In particular, the NPPF does not address concerns regarding poor quality that often results through housing created under permitted development rights (PDR). With such urgency to increase numbers more new homes could be created through this mechanism. Our view is that this would be detrimental to communities in the longer term and we would like to see a new approach to PDR.”
The CIC is also urging government to channel greater resources into strategic planning and to strengthen support for retrofit first.
In its response, the CIC has put a stick into the spokes of government spin that trumpeted plans for 300 more planning officers.
“Government’s proposal to hire 300 planning officers to ‘get Britain building again’ will replace less than a tenth of the planners who have left public service and roughly equates to one planning officer per department,” the CIC said. “This is insufficient to ‘get Britain building again’.
“It may be that these new planners are best deployed as a focused strategic planning workforce across combined authorities. We are very supportive of the idea of some of the more specialist work of planning departments (which requires specialist expertise) being carried out on a regional level. This could, in part, provide a solution to chronic understaffing and skills shortages in planning.”
The CIC also said that the NPPF is too weak on getting developers to reuse existing buildings before putting up new ones.
“The policy of ‘encouraging’ the reuse of existing resources including the conversion of existing buildings is insufficiently strong in the NPPF,” the CIC said.
Mina Hasman, chair of CIC’s climate change committee, said: “The newly planned homes are expected to face some of the most severe and long-lasting impacts of climate change making it imperative that they are designed to be both resilient and low carbon. It is therefore, critical that our planning policies support homes built to an ambitious Future Homes Standard and drive the successful adoption of blue-green infrastructure including SuDS [sustainable drainage systems]. The policy of encouraging the reuse of existing resources within the NPPF should be strengthened to better incentivise retrofitting, improve design solutions, and dramatically reduce waste and carbon emissions in line with government’s stated commitment to a more circular economy.”
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