Emerging problematics of deregulating the urban: The case of permitted development in England

Abstract

Urban planning systems, processes and regulations are often blamed – by many mainstream economists – for constraining the supply of housing by interfering with the efficient allocation of land by the market and unnecessarily delaying development. In England, this orthodox view has influenced the government’s deregulatory planning reforms, including – since 2013 – the removal of the requirement for developers to apply for planning permission for the conversion of an office building to a residential one (making it ‘permitted development’). Drawing on original empirical research in five local authority areas in England, this article examines the impacts of this deregulation of planning control on the ground. We find that, although more housing units have been delivered than were expected, a focus on housing numbers is eclipsing problems of housing quality, the type of housing being made available and whether it is in sustainable locations. There are also costs of deregulating planning, including direct financial costs and the lost opportunity to secure affordable housing and public infrastructure through planning gain. We conclude by examining the contradictions in the UK government’s approach to addressing the housing crisis and propose there are dangers of deregulating the urban that have consequences for England and other countries pursuing neoliberal reforms.

Hard, soft and thin governance spaces in land-use change: comparing office-to-residential conversions in England, Scotland and the Netherlands

“…Many of these concerns are common across many different local authorities in England (Clifford et al 2018(Clifford et al , 2019Ferm et al 2021). They suggest that the deregulation of office-to-residential conversions results in market adhocracy, showing significant limitations in terms of delivering policy objectives, as defined both centrally and locally.…”

“…In the Netherlands and the UKboth England and Scotlandas in many other national contexts, we have seen distinct planning reforms in recent years which appeal to the logics of neoliberalization, yet in variegated ways (Allmendinger and Haughton 2013;Peck 2013;Inch 2018;Davoudi, Galland, and Stead 2020). In particular, in both England and the Netherlands, policy changes for office-to-residential conversions have been aimed at creating a more responsive (de)regulatory environment while incentivizing the market (Muldoon-Smith and Greenhalgh 2016; Clifford et al 2018;Remøy and Street 2018;Ferm et al 2021). In England, since 2013, central government has experimented with changes to national planning regulations so that office-to-residential conversions no longer require planning permission, usually required on a case-by-case basis under the British tradition.…”

Housing quality and design standards in England: the driving forces for change and their implications

“…For Ferm et al (2020) and others, the novelty of recent policy is that the mostly Conservative governments in power since 2010 have managed conflicting requirements through deregulation, based on a neoliberal policy orthodoxy. While it is possible to identify examples of neoliberal deregulation, this is only half the story.…”

“…Small house extensions require building regulation approval and sometimes other permissions or consents but not planning permission and the extent of permitted development, measured in terms of the size of the extension, has been progressively relaxed. More significant is the policy, introduced in 2013, to extend permitted development rights so that first offices and then in a subsequent extension shops can be converted into housing without planning permission (Clifford et al, 2018;Ferm et al, 2020).…”

Flat Ontology and Evolving Governance: Consequences for Planning Theory and Practice

“…Jointly these discourses have facilitated processes of deregulation and decentralisation in various Western European countries (Lord, Tewdwr-Jones 2018;Olesen, Carter 2018). These reforms have, in general, reduced the capacities of the planning system to tackle contemporary societal challenges, while new planning institutions increasingly restricted planning to procedural steps and did not necessarily give citizens more possibilities to participate in planning processes and to influence the outcomes of the processes (Alfasi, Migdalovich 2020;Ferm et al 2020;Lennon, Waldron 2019;Tait, Inch 2016;Wargent 2020). Planning has, thus, increasingly become what it was blamed for.…”