The appeal of the Premier League’s Fantasy Football game lies in its simplicity. There are just a few basic rules – a maximum squad value and limits on the number of players from any one team and in each position. Beyond that, players can indulge their dreams of being the next Pep Guardiola, picking whatever squad they think will perform best overall. As I argue in a new paper for the Adam Smith Institute, our planning system should be popular and gamified, just like fantasy football.
But, what on earth does that have to do with building more homes? Well, let’s look at how the current system operates.
Right now, councils are supposed to set out where new homes can be built in a local plan, but opposition to the choice of development sites can be fierce, slowing down the planning process and often bringing it to a halt.
Only a third of councils have an up-to-date local plan. Under our current planning system, without new plans allocating sites for development, we won’t deliver the homes we so urgently need.
And yet in most local authorities, there are far more suitable development sites than the council needs to see built on to meet their housing target. Before consulting the public, local authority planners pre-select the combination of those sites they consider most suitable. With so many possible sites, there are multiple reasonable combinations making this site selection stage inherently subjective.
It is also an opaque process optimised for confrontation. Local authorities are tasked with answering the question ‘what is the best mix of sites to meet your housing need?’ Local residents, in contrast, are asked ‘do you think this particular site should be built on?’ It is easy to find a reason to object to a proposed development if you don’t have to suggest an alternative.
Fantasy football shows us a better approach.
A simple online interface can be pre-loaded with a housing target for each settlement and details of the sites considered suitable for building by planning officers. Local residents would be asked to pick their preferred combination of sites to deliver that target. They would be perfectly able to oppose the development of any one of those sites – but they would have to choose an alternative instead. Rather than asking ‘if’ new homes should be built, communities would be asked ‘where’.
The sites local communities actually like would be identified, not just those they vehemently oppose. And responses should be more representative too. The complexity of information and the difficulty in preparing a response is a key barrier to public participation in the planning system. This simplified, transparent process would make the relevant information easily accessible, encouraging more people to be involved, especially young adults (80% of whom have never engaged with a local plan process).
It would change the behaviour of landowners too. Currently, securing a development allocation in a local plan is firstly a defensive exercise – make your proposal immune from criticism. More innovative projects carry risk: what if the planning officer doesn’t like it? The objective of this gamified approach is to secure support from as wide a range of the community as possible. Developers will want to make their sites as popular as possible, encouraging higher quality design and the inclusion of features the community really wants. They will become marketeers highlighting the positives of their schemes, and running ‘get-out-the-vote’ style operations to encourage responses from the silent majority who support new building.
The result would be a clearer understanding of why each site has been chosen, better quality development proposals more reflective of community opinions and – hopefully – more confidence in the planning system. A fantasy we would all like to make a reality.
Paul Smith’s paper, ‘Popular Planning: Using Fantasy Football to Reimagine the Planning System’, is published by the Adam Smith Institute.
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