Strategic Planning

PricedOut has always campaigned for policies that will solve the UK’s housing crisis by building more homes, especially in existing urban environments. Solving the housing crisis can go hand in hand with reducing sprawl and reducing our carbon footprint. Strategic planning has a number of attractive features but, unfortunately, when it was last tried in the UK it was politically unviable – the 2004 South West plan alone received 40,000 objections. Housing policies need to take into account the political realities, working to improve the supply of housing, which is why we think policies like street votes, community land auctions and estate ballots are more likely to be successful in the long term. Mayoral authorities can be a suitable and democratic alternative for ensuring that transport infrastructure is delivered.

In this article, Samuel Watling sets out the failures of British central planning and why we should consider alternatives when it comes to delivering the homes we need.

Summary

• Strategic planning has been central to the design of the British planning system since its introduction in the 1940s.
• Because of the inherent political pressures, strategic planning has faced consistent pushback, with plans dismantled before they could deliver significant numbers of new homes. There is no reason to expect this not to happen again.
• The forms of development we need most are based upon the growth of high-wage settlements to create well-designed, dense, walkable urban environments that promote green living. The concepts of creating geographically separate New Towns and strategic planning were devised in the first half of the 20th century to stop this from happening.

In the history of British planning, Patrick Abercrombie has two unique contributions. Most famously he was an early campaigner for the introduction of planning and a principal member of the Barlow Commission, which set out the framework for introducing the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. 

What is less well known however is that he remains the only person to ever have authored a strategic plan for South East England which produced a significant number of new homes. The 1944 London Plan became the founding epitome of British strategic planning. Its goal was to end the pre-war complaints about the unplanned growth of London by limiting London’s growth through a green belt of seven to nine miles width, and meeting London’s demand for housing through planned new towns in nearby counties.

Strategic planning in Britain follows the basic logic set out by Abercrombie. Housebuilding pressure in one area (such as London) is supposed to be redirected across a larger area (the entire southeast). According to its advocates, this has two advantages. Firstly, planning over a larger area can supposedly ensure that the housing development is coordinated with infrastructure development. Secondly, direct oversight is meant to ensure development can take place in more environmentally sustainable locations and with lower externalities. 

This is how strategic planning is meant to work in theory. However, in practice, the designation of where housing can be built is far more difficult than the designation of where housing cannot be built. 

For example, after Abercrombie’s plan had begun, councils on the edge of the green belt successfully lobbied for green belt extension – expanding London’s green belt to 35 miles in places. 

Therefore, after the mid-1950s, attempts at strategic planning have had to overcome the planning restrictions at a local level which stop building on areas to which planners wish to “redirect” growth. 

To this day, this has not stopped planners from trying to resurrect the dreams of Abercrombie. The 1960s government of Harold Wilson supported the planner’s quest for regional planning. It commissioned ambitious plans for new settlements across the southeast in the 1966 southeast strategy and set up a Land Commission to purchase land at a discount to make these plans a reality. In addition, it passed a new planning law in 1968 which would combine with the Radcliffe Maud reforms in local government to give planning powers to larger county authorities, rather than small district councils. This would then ensure housebuilding would be coordinated at even the local level, brushing away the influence and opposition of these districts which had so strongly opposed housebuilding in the post-war period. 

However, all this was in vain. Unsurprisingly, both the Land Commission and the proposed local government reforms were met with strong resistance from areas in which additional building would be likely, namely the outer south east and countryside around Birmingham and Manchester. The Conservatives under Edward Heath took advantage of this issue to win votes, and promised to abolish the Land Commission in their manifesto and respect local allocations of land for building.  When the Wilson government lost the 1970 election to Heath, he kept his word and duly scrapped all of these proposals.

The only proposals that had some success were the introduction of larger scale structure plans to allow co-ordination between existing districts. However, although they may have made life easier for planners, they lacked significant statutory power and enforced annual housing targets often in the low hundreds, rather than the thousands as Abercrombie had managed. Needless to say these plans did nothing to reverse the continual decline in British housebuilding from already inadequate levels between 1968 and 1981. 

This status quo remained until the government of Tony Blair, which attempted to introduce moderately higher regional and therefore local targets under the guise of Regional Spatial Strategies. Even these modest proposals provoked large-scale opposition by local residents. The South-West spatial strategy alone received 40,000 objections. Once again the Conservative and Liberal Democrat opposition was more than happy to collect these votes and promised to abolish these strategies if elected, which duly happened in 2010. 

Many planners today bemoan this abolition of strategic planning for Britain’s current housing crisis. Yet the current results of the one remaining instance of strategic planning in England that is backed up by significant powers suggests otherwise. The London Plan sets the housing targets for London as a whole and is distributed across boroughs at the discretion of the mayor, who also controls transportation planning. However, this does little to increase the overall housing output of Britain’s most expensive city. The local plans that guide development are ultimately under the control of individual boroughs, meaning that despite the London Plan’s target of building 52,500 homes a year, in practice that annual number is closer to 30,000. The accumulation of various rules in the London Plan that limit what can be built may even mean that its overall on housing supply has been negative.

Why is it that despite its early success, British strategic planning has failed to deliver noticeable numbers of housing for over 60 years? The reason is that its method of allocating land for new housing is politically toxic. Strategic planning does not solve the central problem in the British planning system: local communities where housing is built receive no or few tangible benefits from new housing, but suffer nearly all the externalities from it. Dispersing development over a large area may fit with now outdated ideas about the ideal forms of  development. But no matter how good the plans look on a map, it does not change the assessment at the level which matters: that of the voters who are affected. 

In fact such development arguably makes the political calculus worse. Instead of only inconveniencing voters in a select few constituencies, it spreads out the externalities and enrages local voters in as many areas as possible, many of them marginal constituencies. It is worth noting that one of the central organisations that promotes strategic planning, the Town and Country Planning Association, refuses to publish its preferred locations of the new towns it wants built, presumably due to political backlash. 

The early success of strategic planning was under conditions that were exceptional in post-war Britain. Abercrombie’s plan was drawn up during the Second World War, when there was no major political opposition, and implemented by a Labour government with a historically unprecedented landslide majority of 145 seats. The fact that at that time private renters still outnumbered homeowners also substantially helped. 

However, under conventional political conditions, this style of programme is not possible. The overall pattern is the same as occurred in the 1960s. Proposals are made. But the nature both of the British planning system and of large-scale plans which require new settlements and infrastructure means that the plans take multiple years to be formulated, let alone implemented. Meanwhile, the residents and councils affected organise against the plans. If the tens of thousands of registered opponents are engaged enough to write and object, they are also enraged enough to change their vote. This number of voters, spread out over multiple constituencies, has the potential to swing elections. It is unsurprising then that there was a strong electoral incentive to end strategic planning. The opposition then court these voters by promising to abolish said regional planning bodies and housing targets. Therefore the only strategic plans that are politically sustainable in the long term are the ones which have negligible impacts on housing production.

Political constraints are not necessarily a reason to dismiss a project outright. After all, every attempt to build more houses anywhere faces significant, and often terminal, political hostility from affected residents. Instead the decision of whether those who support more housing should endorse a strategy also depends on its benefits if it is successful, relative to those of potential alternatives. However, once again the benefits of strategic planning are highly questionable in practice. 

The existing British planning system was explicitly designed to constrain and discourage urban growth in favour of the creation of new, detached settlements that are the basis of strategic planning. This style of planning, dating from the first half of the 20th century, is contrary to everything that we have learnt since the 1940s about creating economically and environmentally optimal places. 

Both the recent economic experience of Britain and contemporary economic literature emphasises upon the importance of the agglomeration effects and specialisations of existing areas. Simply put, from an environmental and economic perspective the best place to put new homes is within easy reach of existing high quality jobs and infrastructure, such as York, London, and Cambridge. This enables more workers to benefit from the available opportunities for training and high-quality jobs, allowing them to spread those skills around the country later. 

Such urban intensification and expansion is also the best way forward for the environment. Building nearer existing urban areas with better infrastructure allows for homes to be constructed at a higher density. This in turn creates more sustainable development patterns, based on public transport and active travel rather than new settlements, which due to their geographic isolation tend to be low density and car-dependent. 

However, in Britain the historic bias of mid-20th century planners has meant that high density urban expansion is discouraged in favour of detached new settlements. For example, in the current London Plan, government inspectors scrapped a plan to build 13,000 homes a year using “small sites” in London’s suburbs, reducing London’s housing target by more than one-fifth. 

In contrast, British planners have been able to earmark a new settlement of ten thousand homes at Northstowe, 8 miles outside Cambridge. Contrasting these two examples, strategic planning currently has meant prioritising construction in a settlement with no railway stations, shops or GP surgery, meaning its inhabitants have to drive everywhere, while simultaneously blocking housing in one of Britain’s highest productivity and best-connected cities. It may be theoretically possible to create a worse pattern of development from an environmental perspective than this, but you would have to try extremely hard.

Advocates of strategic planning would have us believe that the solution for an urban housing shortage caused by the planning system restricting homes in around cities is to attempt to build homes far outside these areas. This method faces exactly the same political opposition that building homes inside urban areas face, with the added disadvantage of the few homes it manages to enable being built where people do not want to live. 

Instead of creating new planning bodies that are set up to fail due to lack of knowledge of the history of post-war planning, we need to solve the issues of today. We need to focus our attention on the central issue of British housing: the political obstacles to building homes in productive urban areas, giving more people access to the best jobs and opportunities. Everything else is at best a distraction, and at worst a direct hindrance to the housing we need – justified by the outdated planning doctrine developed before modern social science and political reality showed its shortcomings.

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