What we can do now: De-risking planning for social housing delivery
This blog is our summary and key takeaways from Session 13 from the New Homes in New Ways Summit, hosted by Wates. Watch the Summit on our YouTube channel.
How can planning become an enabler of accelerated social rent home delivery?
This panel was chaired by Sarah Chilcott, special advisor, Housing Festival, and included Darren Alexander, Assistant Director, Housing Demand, London Borough of Havering, Jonathan Bower, Partner, Womble Bond Dickinson, Mary Crew, Associate, Stantec and Russell Curtis, Director, RCKa architects.
Sarah Chilcott, who has 16 years of experience in the planning field, has been helping the Housing Festival to work through some of the complexity in relation to planning that emerged through the ecosystem solution presented in the Social Rent Housing Playbook. In this conversation, Sarah made the point that if we want to enable an ecosystem solution, we must address the challenges in the system, and planning is a critical component of this.
Sarah acknowledged that local authorities are under-resourced, and several new policy obligations have been added in recent years, both of which have led to planners with increasingly stretched capacity. However, we must recognise that we need to do something differently, because if we keep doing what we’re doing, we aren’t going to get the homes built at the speed we need to fix the crisis. She added that planning doesn’t have to be seen as a blocker but can be a key enabler in the process. Primarily, panellists discussed Local Development Orders (LDOs) as a planning tool available to local authorities.
What are LDO’s?
Mary described LDO’s as a useful planning mechanism that shouldn’t be seen as a silver bullet but rather an efficient way to achieve development at pace, particularly when it comes to small brownfield sites.
LDO’s are designed to be as flexible as possible, tailored to meet the requirements set out by what you’re trying to achieve. According to Mary, the key is a clear statement of reasons, and then it’s about front-loading the process, baking in all the risk, uncertainty or issues related to viability at the start. This means that when the LDO is adopted, the hard work has been done. After that, proposed developments covered by the LDO go through a relatively simple system of compliance that can rolled out quickly and efficiently across a local authority, and then across many local authorities.
In summary, an LDO:
Grants planning permission for a site or range of sites, or even across a whole local authority area.
Requires a statement of reasons for why you’re using it
Requires certain conditions to be met
Involves specific design codes
Must comply with all environmental codes
Why an LDO?
Jonathan listed the options available to local authorities if they want to deliver housing on small sites in their ownership and pointed out that each of these takes significant time or leads to duplication. For example:
Promote them through the local plan
Add supplementary planning documents
Individual planning applications for each site
Use section 106 agreements to regulate land
Use permitted development rights
Redevelop existing sites through regeneration schemes
Jonathan said that an LDO is a solution that uses the existing regime and added that while local authorities often see this as a new solution, LDO’s have existed for more than twenty years. Mary added that the proof is in the pudding, and where they are being used, they have been successful. Jonathan added that LDO’s have policy support in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in relation to small sites, and where they promote economic, social or environmental gains for an area.
Planning innovation in practice
Russell discussed how RCKa helped Ealing Council tackle its homelessness crisis by developing a strategy for delivering affordable homes on small sites using MMC.
This led to the development of a west London pattern book for small sites and MMC, funded by the Greater London Authority (GLA). In 2020, RCKa were also appointed to help Lewisham Council prepare a small site design guide to help it meet its London Plan housing targets. This included development of an AI tool for identifying small sites with the view to influencing the London Plan small sites target and encourage London boroughs to ramp up their small site delivery. Darren talked about the planning challenges that arose from a demountable scheme of 18 modular homes within an area allocated for the final phase of the Waterloo & Queen Street regeneration scheme, in Romford. This demonstrated that planning in innovative contexts, or those trying to meet the housing need at the sharpest end, can be complex.
The panellists concluded on a hopeful note - that there are things that can be done now to de-risk planning and deliver much-needed social rent homes at pace.