Can ‘Permission in Principle’ for New Housing in England Increase Certainty, Reduce ‘Planning Risk’, and Accelerate Housing Supply?

Gallent, Nick; Magalhães, Claudio de; Trigo, Sonia Freire; Scanlon, Kathleen; Whitehead, Christine

doi:10.1080/14649357.2019.1672772

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Private enterprise expects the state to coordinate and (sometimes) deliver an infrastructural framework for development. Even where public planning is derided as a hindrance to housing supply and economic development, developers themselves greatly value the public coordination of infrastructure investment (Gallent et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

International experience of public infrastructure delivery in support of housing growth

Gallent

Morphet

Chiu³

et al. 2020

Cities

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This paper compares planning and funding arrangements for public infrastructure delivery in support of new housing development in the UK, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, the US, and Hong Kong/ Mainland China. It examines the roles and responsibilities of different levels of government, the extraction of financial contributions from the development process (mainly funded through increases in land value), and the level of involvement of private and public actors in infrastructure delivery and land value capture (LVC). Three linked questions provide a basis for comparison of the cases: first, what arrangements are in place, in terms of planning hierarchy and responsibility, for coordinating infrastructure delivery (and how do these relate to funding arrangements); second, how are local contributions extracted from the development process or through the acquisition and sale of land; and lastly, what inferences can be drawn regarding the relative power of public and private actors in this process and to what extent is public interest prioritized/served through prevailing approaches to value extraction. The paper contributes international experience to debates on optimizing planning approaches for infrastructure delivery while maximizing public benefit from land value.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

International experience of public infrastructure delivery in support of housing growth

Gallent

Morphet

Chiu³

et al. 2020

Cities

Self Cite

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“…Adherents of this perspective argue for a simpler planning system, that allows market competition, greater diversity of developers and, in turn, more adaptable places. Arguments in this arena contend that the flexibility inherent in the locally focused 1947 Town and Country Planning Act has been constrained by increased legislation as local plans have been strengthened (MacGregor & Ross, 1995) alongside the reequipment for detailed action plans, supplementary planning documents, housing and economic land availability assessments, and brownfield registers (Gallent et al, 2019;Schulze-Bang & Webb, 2020).…”

Section: Changing Planning Context In Englandmentioning

confidence: 99%

Planning Adaptation: Accommodating Complexity in the Built Environment

Muldoon‐Smith

Moreton

2022

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Obsolescence and vacancy are part of the traditional building life cycle, as tenants leave properties and move to new ones. Flux, a period of uncertainty before the establishment of new direction, can be considered part of building DNA. What is new, due to structural disruptions in the way we work, is the rate and regularity of flux, reflected in obsolescence, vacancy, and impermanent use. Covid-19 has instantly accelerated this disruption. Retail failure has increased with even more consumers moving online. While employees have been working from home, rendering the traditional office building in the central business district, at least temporarily, obsolete. This article reflects on the situation by reporting findings from an 18-month research project into the practice of planning adaptation in the English built environment. Original findings based on interviews with a national sample of local authority planners, combined with an institutional analysis of planning practice since the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, suggest that the discipline of planning in England is struggling with the reality of flux. There is a demand for planning to act faster, due to the speed of change in the built environment, and liberal political concerns with planning regulation. This is reflected in relaxations to permitted development rules and building use categories. However, participants also indicate that there is a concurrent need for the planning system to operate in a more measured way, to plan the nuanced complexity of a built environment no longer striated by singular use categories at the local level. This notion of flux suggests a process of perpetual change, turbulence, and volatility. However, our findings suggest that within this process, there is a temporal dialectic between an accelerating rate of change in the built environment and a concomitant need to plan in a careful way to accommodate adaptation. We situate these findings in a novel reading of the complex adaptive systems literature, arguing that planning practice needs to embrace uncertainty, rather than eradicate it, in order to enable built environment adaptation. These findings are significant because they offer a framework for understanding how successful building adaptation can be enabled in England, moving beyond the negativity associated with the adaptation of buildings in recent years. This is achieved by recognizing the complex interactions involved in the adaptation process between respective stakeholders and offering an insight into how respective scales of planning governance can coexist successfully.

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“…On the one hand, the planning profession has been tasked with ensuring institutional certainty, which is necessary for the legal instrumentalisation of urban development, on the other, these processes require diverse forms of institutional flexibility to enable easy, fast and efficient forms of implementation. This ambiguous position between certainty and flexibility has been subject to academic attention (Gallent et al, 2019;Waldron, 2019;Tasan-Kok, 2008) as it creates a dynamic institutional environment through which the blurred boundaries of the planning profession are defined. In this essay, we draw together the lessons from the contributions above to explore how this period of uncertainty might also be seen as an opportunity to look for a 'better place' for the planning profession in both the UK and globally.…”

Section: Notes On Contributorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Future of the Planning Profession

Parker¹,

Wargent²,

Linovski³

et al. 2020

Planning Theory & Practice

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This Interface emerged from a symposium on the future of the planning profession held at the University of Reading in September 2019. This reflected on present new challenges concerning the means, political standing, and substantive goals of planning across the globe. Some issues discussed are longer-run and continually shifting. The conditions and tasks faced by planning have morphed, as have the types of people and sectoral balance involved in planning. Renewed scrutiny over the environment, quality of development, and its accountability to the public it seeks to serve, are active topics in the UK. Pointedly, concerns over a public sector planning that has been weakened by a decade of austerity, and destabilised by serial changes are in the forefront of peoples' minds, with advocates of further deregulation and reform currently holding court (e.g., Airey & Doughty, 2020). With such changes ongoing now is a good time to consider the future of the profession. The essays that follow largely address issues for the profession in the UK but are also more widely applicable.Despite a growth and diversification in planning activity, the profession in the UK is often undervalued with persistent public distrust in planners and the system. The Raynsford Report examining the planning system in England recently argued that "broader civil society consensus around the need for planning has fragmented, and many people are simply unclear about what the system is for" (2018, p. 23). The regulatory system has been the subject of continual structural change and this is likely to continue in years to come. The profession is once again under assault with Hugh Ellis (2020, n.p.) recently forecasting "the endgame" for the English planning system and "the ideals which founded the planning movement." As a result, planning's operating environment is breeding uncertainty, and it is more challenging to be a planner in such circumstances. A lack of transparency in the UK adds to the gap between the planners and the planned, as well as between different forms, sectors, spatial scales, or types of 'planner.'The issues taken up by the wide-ranging contributions below reflect the ideas for progressive change found across the profession and the breadth of concerns being aired. Numerous voices from within planning are now talking about the 'future of the profession' to varying degrees of acuity. These debates cohere around some key threads: holding up for scrutiny how the planning profession thinks about corresponding to the changing, diversifying environment; how to more effectively address the substantive challenges faced by planning; improving the state of public understanding and engagement; and lastly how actors involved in planning -notably the Universities and the CONTACT Gavin Parker

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Can ‘Permission in Principle’ for New Housing in England Increase Certainty, Reduce ‘Planning Risk’, and Accelerate Housing Supply?

Cited by 12 publications

References 20 publications

International experience of public infrastructure delivery in support of housing growth

International experience of public infrastructure delivery in support of housing growth

Planning Adaptation: Accommodating Complexity in the Built Environment

The Future of the Planning Profession

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