Housing politics in Britain tends to be predictable. Labour try to build more in Tory and Liberal Democrat-voting areas, while the Tories try to build more in London. Every so often, however, something unexpected happens. One of those events occurred this week, when the Labour Government announced a new system of ‘planning passports’. As reported, planning passports would mean that specified kinds of brownfield development would enjoy default permission.
Planning passports have international precedents, and they are not necessarily especially radical. For example, the town of South Bend, Indiana (famous for its recent mayor, Pete Buttigieg) has pre-approved a suite of suburban house designs. This reduces the cost and risk associated with design approval to zero, helping with viability and affordability. This sort of scheme is not unusual in the United States.
Everyone wants more density here
The difference lies in the kind of development permitted. South Bend is a heavily deindustrialised town whose centre has seen a precipitous drop in population in recent decades. Its streets are riddled with empty plots, because demand is so low that it is not financially viable to replace the demolished old buildings. The planning passports are aimed at pushing some more of those fallow plots over the line into viability, an objective that pretty much everyone will support.
There are places in England like this, which would benefit from a similar system. This is a theme that Create Streets has done much work on, and which is one of the motives behind the roll-out of design codes nationally. But this does not seem to be the Government’s sole or main intention here. As reported, the scheme would introduce default permission for apartment blocks of specified designs on brownfield sites. When one remembers that all existing houses are brownfield sites, the potential radicalism of the scheme becomes clear: apparently, the Government is proposing to introduce default permission for demolishing suburban houses and replacing them with blocks of flats.
Now, there are historical precedents for allowing this too – but old ones. Under the liberal systems that prevailed until the 1940s, all European countries allowed suburban houses to be demolished and replaced with mansion blocks: this process was completely routine, and it is responsible for the character of most European city centres today. Neighbourhoods that were frozen ‘mid-densification’ in the 1940s illustrate this process. For example, St John’s Wood was originally developed with spacious detached houses in the early 19th century. In the 20th century, it was in the process of being redeveloped as flats when the introduction of the planning system froze it mid-transition. If the liberal order had lasted a little longer, the Regency villas in the image below would have been replaced by mansion blocks like those on the neighbouring street, increasing the floor space density manyfold.
Densification under the old liberal system
Densification like this has many advantages. It could potentially generate a huge amount of housing, and it could do so in places where housing need is greatest. It enables more of the population to live in car-independent places, with the associated environmental, social and health benefits. My own view is that it may have a central role to play in addressing the housing shortage.
The trouble with densification is that it tends to be extremely unpopular. The disruption it generates is far greater than that of greenfield development: if two-storey houses in a nearby field are annoying, how much worse is an eight-storey block of flats in your neighbour’s back garden? When the last Labour government allowed an extremely mild form of densification through designating gardens as brownfield sites, it generated a great deal of pushback. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats campaigned on the issue, won the election, and revoked the designation. Something similar happened recently when the Labour council in Croydon introduced a mildly pro-densification small sites policy.
There have been various international attempts to mitigate the unpopularity of densification, and some of them have been remarkably successful. But the Government’s planning passports don’t seem to include any such refinements. As reported, they seem to be pretty close to what Anya Martin calls the ‘1894 Plan’, of reinstating the liberal late-Victorian development control system and watching the carnage ensue. If the Government really did do this, we could expect political pushback that would make the response to Robert Jenrick’s white paper seem trivial by comparison.
Will it actually happen this way? One has one’s doubts. Labour has done itself some surprisingly gratuitous political damage on housing recently, but it beggars belief that what is ultimately a highly successful political party would unleash a wave of hugely unpopular development in hundreds of its own constituencies. But who knows? Strange things happen in politics. And it would certainly get a lot of homes built while it lasted.
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