Levelling up

Planning can ensure a good level of access to services and infrastructure which are critical for people’s health and the long-term sustainability of towns and cities, including:

• Affordable housing delivered through planning obligations saved the NHS £240 million in 2019;
• Living in a well-planned neighbourhood can support up to 59% of NHS-recommended weekly activity;
• Urban greenspaces in Great Britain provide £16.5 billion in environmental, health and amenity value per year;
• Planning ensures good access to economic opportunities, with 73% of planning housing permissions in England located within 10km of a major employment cluster;
• Homes developed through planning permission are three times more likely to meet National Space Standards; and,
• Planning policies prevent excess air pollution, which costs the UK £9-19 billion each year.

The RTPI’s 2020 ‘Invest and Prosper’ research explored how the planning systems in the UK set the context for development and create the enabling conditions for sustainable, high-quality, and well-designed places. Planners enable quality development through two core functions: plan-making and development management:

• Plan-making identifies local strategic priorities for development and supports placemaking. Local development plans set out both an ambitious vision for future development and identifying and addressing an area’s needs for housing, employment, and infrastructure. Plan-making provides an opportunity for stakeholders to bring different perspectives to the planning process, and for communities to be involved in designing the future of places. National planning policies (described below) provide guidance for plan-making to deliver well-designed, high-quality places for communities to live and work.
  
  
• Development management is a proactive process to align development with local development plans and meet quality standards. All new development goes through a process of planning permission where Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) ensure that development meets statutory criteria for quality and aligns with local strategies. This process also allows for LPAs to negotiate contributions from developers to support community needs or to mitigate concerns the LPA may have about the introduction of a new development in the area. This typically involves compensation for potential negative impacts of development (such as increased pressure on resources and pollution), provision of affordable housing and a contribution to meet wider infrastructure needs.

Local authority spending on planning fell by a third in the decade from 2009-10 in absolute terms (from £686m in 2009-10 to £401m in 2017-18).

This works out at approximately £1.2 million per local authority or about £7 per person a year.

Without appropriate resources, areas with the poorest health, social and environmental outcomes will benefit the least from any reforms to our planning system.

While government has recognised the planning system’s key role in delivering levelling up, the capacity of planning departments at a local level is constrained by limited resources and misaligned incentives structures. This limits the delivery of essential planning policy functions like developing local plans, enforcing planning law, heritage and conservation planning in the areas that need to level up most.

Despite the huge benefits of strategic planning only a small fraction of local government budgets are allocated to planning services (0.5% in 2017-18). Total expenditure on planning by local planning authorities is now just £900 million a year across England but more than half of this is recouped in income (mostly fees) bringing total net investment in planning down to just £400 million. Comparatively, local authorities now spend almost fifty times as much on housing benefit as on planning.

The regional imbalance is also stark: local authorities in the North West, West Midlands, and Yorkshire spend £3 per resident (per year on average) on planning policy, below the national average of £5.50.

You can contact us about levelling up by emailing our Public Affairs team: [email protected]