A genuinely plan-led system Getting simple, meaningful local plans in place faster that give more certainty to communities that the right homes will be built in the right places. In the Bill The Bill makes several changes to strengthen the role of democratically produced plans, so that decisions on applications are more genuinely plan-led:
Local plans will be given more weight when making decisions on applications, so that there must be strong reasons to override the plan. The same weight will be given to other parts of the development plan, including minerals and waste plans prepared by minerals and waste planning authorities, neighbourhood plans prepared by local communities, and spatial development strategies produced to address important planning issues at a more strategic scale.
To help make the content of plans faster to produce and easier to navigate, policies on issues that apply in most areas (such as general heritage protection) will be set out nationally. These will be contained in a suite of National Development Management Policies, which will have the same weight as plans so that they are taken fully into account in decisions.
Several other changes are provided for to improve the process for preparing local plans and minerals and waste plans: digital powers in the Bill will allow more standardised and reusable data to inform plan-making; a series of ‘Gateway’ checks during production will help to spot and correct any problems at an early stage; there will be a new duty for infrastructure providers to engage in the process where needed; and the ‘duty to cooperate’ contained in existing legislation will be repealed and replaced with a more flexible alignment test set out in national policy (see below). New Local Plan Commissioners may be deployed to support or ultimately take over plan-making if local planning authorities fail to meet their statutory duties. These changes will increase the numbers of authorities with up-to-date plans in place (currently only at 39%), giving more communities a meaningful say over new development in their area while supporting new homebuilding.
Opportunities for communities and other interested parties to influence and comment on emerging plans will be retained, with the digital powers allowing both plans and underpinning data to be accessed and understood more easily.
Local planning authorities will have a new power to prepare ‘supplementary plans’, where policies for specific sites or groups of sites need to be prepared quickly (e.g., in response to a new regeneration opportunity), or to set out design standards. These plans will replace the ‘supplementary planning documents’ which councils produce currently, but which do not carry the same weight.
The Bill will also enable groups of authorities to collaborate to produce a voluntary spatial development strategy, where they wish to provide strategic planning policies for issues that cut across their areas (echoing the powers conferred on some Mayoral combined authorities already).
Proposals which were set out in the Planning for the Future White Paper for all land to be placed in prescribed categories and linked to automatic ‘in principle’ permission for development in areas identified for development, are not being taken forward. Local plans, including minerals and waste plans, will also continue to be assessed for whether they are ‘sound’ at examination, but we will review whether the current tests are sufficiently proportionate as part of the work to update the National Planning Policy Framework, detailed below. As well as giving neighbourhood plans greater weight in planning decisions, the Bill will increase the accessibility of neighbourhood planning by allowing parish councils and neighbourhood forums to produce a simpler ‘neighbourhood priorities statement’ which the local authority will be obliged to take into account when preparing its local plan. The Bill also includes new ‘street vote’ powers, allowing residents on a street to bring forward proposals to extend or redevelop their properties in line with their design preferences. Where prescribed development rules and other statutory requirements are met, the proposals would then be put to a referendum of residents on the street, to determine if they should be given planning permission. Alongside the Bill To incentivise plan production further and ensure that newly produced plans are not undermined, our intention is to remove the requirement for authorities to maintain a rolling five-year supply of deliverable land for housing, where their plan is up to date, i.e., adopted within the past five years. This will curb perceived ‘speculative development’ and ‘planning by appeal’, so long as plans are kept up to date. We will consult on changes to be made to the National Planning Policy Framework. This is just one of the changes that we intend to make to the National Planning Policy Framework to support effective implementation of the Bill. Most fundamentally, we will need to identify and consult on the National Development Management Policies which will sit alongside plans to guide decision-making. They will be derived from the policies set out currently in the National Planning Policy Framework, where these are intended to guide decision-making, but we will also identify and seek views on any gaps in the issues which are covered. The rest of the National Planning Policy Framework will be re-focused on setting out the principles to be taken into account in plan-making, whilst also streamlining national policy, making it more accessible and user friendly. Alongside this, regulations will be updated to set clear timetables for plan production – with the expectation that they are produced within 30 months and updated at least every five years. During this period, there will be a requirement for two rounds of community engagement before plans are submitted for independent examination. We will also produce new guidance on community engagement in planning, which will describe the different ways in which communities can get involved and highlight best practice, including the opportunities which digital technology offers. Any new digital engagement tools will sit alongside existing methods of engagement (such as site notices and neighbour letters). For decision making, the Bill will also enable pre-application engagement with communities to be required before a planning application is submitted, remove the sunset clause, making the powers which currently expire in 2025, permanent.